The James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) has made an incredible discovery: for the first time in history, it has independently discovered and photographed a single planet outside our Solar System. Previously, the telescope observed exoplanets that had already been discovered, but now, thanks to its ultra-sensitive instruments, it has been able to make discoveries independently. The discovery was also facilitated by the extraordinary brightness of the exoplanet, which is currently in the process of formation.
The object turned out to be a gas giant named TWA 7b, similar in size to Saturn. The planet orbits a very young star, only 6 million years old, and still glows intensely with the residual heat from its formation. The extraordinary brightness of the exoplanet exceeds that of any other known exoplanet by tens of times. TWA 7b is also the lightest planet ever discovered outside the Solar System.
Confirmation of the hypothesis
But most importantly, TWA 7b is the first direct evidence of the existence of hypothetical “shepherd planets.” Astronomers have long suspected that such objects could create clear gaps in the dust and ice rings surrounding young stars, “grazing” the residual material with their gravity.
The TWA 7 system, located 110 light-years away from us, has three concentric rings of debris. In the narrow middle ring, James Webb discovered a clear gap, and inside it, a source of infrared radiation, which turned out to be the planet TWA 7b.
“The discovery shows that planets actually form gaps in disks, as theory predicted, but something that had never been observed directly before,” explains Anne-Marie Lagrange, head of the study at CNRS.
Breakthrough technology
Why has this only been possible now? Direct observation of exoplanets is extremely difficult due to the dazzling glare of their stars. JWST overcame this obstacle thanks to the coronagraph on MIRI, which blocks the light from the star, and a strategy of selecting young systems oriented pole-on to Earth, where the planets still shine brightly in the infrared range.
Modeling confirms that TWA 7b has a mass of about 30% of Jupiter’s mass and orbits very far from its star — 52 times farther than Earth orbits the Sun.
This discovery is just the beginning. The Lagrange team plans to obtain additional data from James Webb to study the atmosphere of TWA 7b, continue the search for other bright young planets, and even attempt to detect cold, old, massive exoplanets that have previously remained elusive.
The discovery of TWA 7b provides unprecedented evidence of the formation processes of planetary systems similar to our own.
Earlier, we explained how to find exoplanets in the Universe.
According to NASA
