【Discuss Section】

You don't see this every day.

It's rare for any observatory to directly image a planet beyond our solar system,Discuss Section called an exoplanet, but the powerful James Webb Space Telescope has captured four of them in the stellar system HR 8799. These large, gaseous worlds are located 130 light-years away in the Milky Way galaxy (a light-year is nearly 6 trillion miles). Importantly, viewing these worlds also revealed major parts of their composition, and how they likely formed.

"Our hope with this kind of research is to understand our own solar system, life, and ourselves in the comparison to other exoplanetary systems, so we can contextualize our existence," William Balmer, an astronomer at Johns Hopkins University who led the new research, said in a statement. "We want to take pictures of other solar systems and see how they’re similar or different when compared to ours. From there, we can try to get a sense of how weird our solar system really is — or how normal."

The research recently published in The Astrophysical Journal.

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It's tremendously challenging to capture direct images of exoplanets — as opposed to common observational methods like watching them transit in front of their stars — because their nearby stars are profoundly luminous, engulfing the exoplanets in light. But Webb blocked out much of the star's intrusive light with an instrument called a coronograph. What's more, these four worlds are large, young, and hot, and orbit relatively far from their star.

"From there, we can try to get a sense of how weird our solar system really is — or how normal."

You can see four of these planets below. "The closest planet to the star, HR 8799 e, orbits 1.5 billion miles from its star, which in our solar system would be located between the orbit of Saturn and Neptune," NASA explains. "The furthest, HR 8799 b, orbits around 6.3 billion miles from the star, more than twice Neptune’s orbital distance." A star symbol covers the star HR 8799, whose light has been blocked.

No, they don't contain the stunning detail we see on the closeby planets in our solar system. Even so, you're seeing far-off worlds in another part of the galaxy.

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The four visible planets of the multi-planet system HR 8799. Credit: NASA / ESA / CSA / STScI / W. Balmer (JHU) / L. Pueyo (STScI) / M. Perrin (STScI)

Crucially, directly viewing these planets allowed astronomers to analyze the unique light signals emanating from these worlds; these wavelengths match certain elements or molecules. Of note, the researchers detected the gases carbon dioxide and carbon monoxide. These planets are extremely young, at some 30 million years old, so astronomers suspect they formed like Saturn and Jupiter, wherein they forged dense solid cores and then gravitationally pulled plentiful surrounding gases like carbon dioxide around them. (Alternatively, sometimes planets might form when they rapidly fuse together inside the rapidly spinning disk of dust and gas around a new star, meaning they're largely composed of the same stuff as their star.)

As Balmer noted above, we need to spy what's transpiring in other corners of the galaxy to better grasp how strange, or not, our solar system neighborhood truly is. Already, we know that many other solar systems contain curious super-Earths — which are bigger than Earth but smaller than Neptune — but there's no such world in our system.

The Webb telescope captured clear "spectral fingerprints" of carbon dioxide and carbon monoxide in the planet HR 8799 e's atmosphere. Credit: NASA / ESA / CSA / STScI / J. Olmsted (STScI)

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The Webb telescope's powerful abilities

The Webb telescope — a scientific collaboration between NASA, ESA, and the Canadian Space Agency — is designed to peer into the deepest cosmos and reveal new insights about the early universe. It's also examining intriguing planets in our galaxy, along with the planets and moons in our solar system.

Here's how Webb is achieving unparalleled feats, and may for years to come:

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- Giant mirror: Webb's mirror, which captures light, is over 21 feet across. That's over two-and-a-half times larger than the Hubble Space Telescope's mirror, meaning Webb has six times the light-collecting area. Capturing more light allows Webb to see more distant, ancient objects. The telescope is peering at stars and galaxies that formed over 13 billion years ago, just a few hundred million years after the Big Bang. "We're going to see the very first stars and galaxies that ever formed," Jean Creighton, an astronomer and the director of the Manfred Olson Planetarium at the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee, told Mashable in 2021.

- Infrared view: Unlike Hubble, which largely views light that's visible to us, Webb is primarily an infrared space telescope, meaning it views light in the infrared spectrum. This allows us to see far more of the universe. Infrared has longer wavelengths than visible light, so the light waves more efficiently slip through cosmic clouds; the light doesn't as often collide with and get scattered by these densely packed particles. Ultimately, Webb's infrared eyesight can penetrate places Hubble can't.

"It lifts the veil," said Creighton.

- Peering into distant exoplanets: The Webb telescope carries specialized equipment called spectrographsthat will revolutionize our understanding of these far-off worlds. The instruments can decipher what molecules (such as water, carbon dioxide, and methane) exist in the atmospheres of distant exoplanets — be they gas giants or smaller rocky worlds. Webb looks at exoplanets in the Milky Way galaxy. Who knows what we'll find?

"We might learn things we never thought about," Mercedes López-Morales, an exoplanet researcher and astrophysicist at the Center for Astrophysics-Harvard & Smithsonian, previously told Mashable.

Topics NASA