The Brown Dwarf This plot shows the infrared spectrum of VHS 1256 b. “At first all I could see was light from the star, but with careful image processing I was able to remove that light and uncover the planet.”Ĭarter and his colleagues are now preparing a publication on their analysis for submission to a peer-reviewed journal. “Obtaining this image felt like digging for space treasure,” says Aarynn Carter (University of California, Santa Cruz), who led the image analysis. It also helps that the system is young, only 15 to 20 million years old, so the planet itself is still glowing from the heat of its formation. Webb’s cameras have coronagraphs that help out by blocking the star’s brilliance. Stars shine less brilliantly at infrared wavelengths, but even so this planet was still 10,000 times fainter than its star. It’s nothing like the giants in our solar system, with a mass between 6 and 12 times that of Jupiter and a distance from its host star that’s 10 times farther out. Late last week, the Webb team released its first image of an exoplanet, a gas giant known as HIP 6542 b. The bar shapes in the NIRCam images are artifacts of the telescope’s optics, not objects in the scene. A coronagraph blocks out the host star’s light the star's position is marked in each image by a small white star. The Planet This image shows the exoplanet HIP 65426 b in different bands of infrared light (3 microns in purple, 4.44 microns in blue, 11.4 microns in yellow, and 15.5 microns in red. Though all three celestial objects have been studied before, Webb provides details astronomers can’t get anywhere else. Over the past week, the James Webb Space Telescope has captured both its first exoplanet and its first brown dwarf as well as photographed the firestorm of star formation in the Tarantula Nebula.

Silk elements