![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/07\/webb-stsci-01jvz8shat3f5at4awwhwx4dg4-2k-e1751436450666-1024x515.jpg\")
TWA 7 is blocked in this image by the black circle, while the planet glows in orange \u2013 credit, NASA, ESA, CSA, Anne-Marie Lagrange (CNRS, UGA), Mahdi Zamani (ESA \/ Webb)<\/p>\n TWA 7 is blocked in this image by the black circle, while the planet glows in orange \u2013 credit, NASA, ESA, CSA, Anne-Marie Lagrange (CNRS, UGA), Mahdi Zamani (ESA \/ Webb)<\/p>\n
Since its debut in 2021, the James Webb Space Telescope has dazzled viewers with its infrared images of galaxies, nebulae, stars, and even our own solar system\u2019s planets.<\/p>\n
Now, the most expensive telescope ever made has unveiled a new trick\u2014a coronagraph, which allows it to block the light of a star and see what small objects are orbiting it. In this case, it performed the first direct photographing of an exoplanet in human history; probably.<\/p>\n
The image found a faint source of infrared light in a disk of debris orbiting TWA 7, a red dwarf star around 111 light years from Earth. With the outstanding chance of the object being a background galaxy at more than 0%, the researchers can\u2019t say for certain it\u2019s a planet, but they suspect very much that it is\u2014around the size of Saturn and sitting at a comfortable 120\u00b0 Fahrenheit.<\/p>\n
Though astronomers have detected well over 5,000 exoplanets so far, each one has been done through indirect methods, such as the \u201ctransit method.\u201d The transit method sees an astronomer train a telescope on a star, and monitor for predictable drops in the level of light from the star that would indicate a planet orbiting it. The transit method can also work through measurements of gravity since passing planets\u2019 gravitational fields can cause their host stars to \u201cwobble.\u201d<\/p>\n
By contrast, the coronagraph will be much more straight forward, and TWA 7 b will likely be the first of many that the Webb telescope will discover.<\/p>\n
One can think of the coronagraph as an on-demand eclipse service. The instrument positions a disk inside the lens of the imaging device to perfectly eliminate the star\u2019s light from entering the sensor within a degree of micrometers. With the pollution of the star\u2019s light gone, small things\u2014in this case an exoplanet\u2014can be seen.<\/p>\n
RECENT WORK FROM JAMES WEBB\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n \u201cOur observations reveal a strong candidate for a planet shaping the structure of the TWA 7 debris disk, and its position is exactly where we expected to find a planet of this mass,\u201d Anne-Marie Lagrange, lead author of the study and an astrophysicist at the French National Center for Scientific Research, said in a statement released<\/a> by NASA on the discovery.<\/p>\n The source is located in a gap in one of three dust rings that were discovered around TWA 7 by previous ground-based observations. The object\u2019s brightness, color, distance from the star, and position within the ring are consistent with theoretical predictions for a young, cold, Saturn-mass planet that is expected to be sculpting the surrounding debris disk.<\/p>\n These visible rings or gaps are thought to be created by planets that have formed around the star, but such a planet has yet to be directly detected within a debris disk. If TWA 7 b is confirmed to be such, it would mark a major moment in astronomy.<\/p>\n SHARE This Great New Trick From Our Expensive Space Telescope\u2026\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"TWA 7 is blocked in this image by the black circle, while the planet glows in orange \u2013…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":233697,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[901,2344,18153,874,70,413,16,15],"class_list":{"0":"post-233696","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-science","8":"tag-astronomy","9":"tag-breakthroughs","10":"tag-james-webb","11":"tag-nasa","12":"tag-science","13":"tag-space","14":"tag-uk","15":"tag-united-kingdom"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@uk\/114787249335243237","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/233696","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=233696"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/233696\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/233697"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=233696"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=233696"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=233696"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}