James Webb Telescope finds its first ever exoplanet

The James Webb Space Telescope has spotted its very first exoplanet. It captured the distant planet, named TWA 7b, as it carves its way through a disc of glowing dust and rocky debris around a star that’s 110 light years away from Earth. So, what did it see? (Picture: ESA/Webb, NASA, CSA, A.M. Lagran)

What is an exoplanet?

An exoplanet is a planet that orbits a star outside our solar system. So far, researchers have discovered nearly 6,000 out of the billions in our galaxy. However, there are thousands more that need further observations to say whether it's a real exoplanet or not. The first exoplanets were discovered in the 1990s. The picture shows the first image of an exoplanet called 2M1207 b (Picture: Nasa/VLT)

So, what did the James Webb Space Telescope find?

The James Webb Space Telescope, also known as the Webb, found a planet orbiting a Red Dwarf Star. The star is known as TWA 7, and the planet as TWA 7b. Nasa reveals that the object's colour, distance from the star, and the position within the ring suggest it is a young, cold, Saturn-mass planet that is expected to be sculpting the surrounding debris disk. Nasa says it has a temperature near 120 degrees Fahrenheit (47 degrees Celsius) (Picture: A.-M. Lagrange and al)

This makes TWA 7b the smallest exoplanet directly observed with a telescope and provides fresh insights into a planetary system in its infancy. Speaking to the Guardian, Dr Anne-Marie Lagrange, an astrophysicist at the Paris Observatory who led the observations, said: ‘Here we’re looking at a system that is about 6 million years old, so we are really witnessing the youth of the planetary system’ (Picture: A.-M. Lagrange and al)

Is it hard to spot an exoplanet?

Exoplanets are hard to spot because they are very faint due to the lack of heat they emit. They are usually blinded by the light of the star they orbit. But Webb has a way to get around that problem. Webb’s MIRI instrument has an attachment to it called a coronagraph that can mask the star, which creates an effect similar to a solar eclipse. Then, it can peer through and spot the planet (Picture: NASA / SWNS)

So the astronomers took a look at the star TWA 7. The star was first spotted in 1999 by the Hubble Space Telescope, and was thought to be promising for two main reasons. It’s a baby, at only 6.4 million years old, and still has a massive disk of gas and dust where planets are thought to form. And lucky for us, from Earth we have a very good view of the three rings it has which can be seen from above the Earth. They stretch more than 100 times the distance separating the sun and Earth, and had previously been spotted by the Very Large Telescope in Chile (Picture: Getty)

But it was from the empty section of the second ring that Webb detected something particularly bright. Astronomers ruled out that the light was coming from an object at the edge of the solar system, or from a distant galaxy behind the star, so that means it could have only been a planet. The Webb’s detection system is vital since smaller, rocky planets similar to Earth or Mars are the ultimate target in the search for habitable worlds outside of the solar system (stock image) (Picture: Getty)