The James Webb Space Telescope has captured a direct image of an exoplanet, the first such image of the space telescope, NASA said.
According to NASA, the exoplanet called "HIP 65426 b" is a giant gaseous planet with no rocky surface and is not habitable.
Its mass is about 6 to 12 times that of Jupiter, and its age is about 15 million to 20 million years old, much younger than Earth.
Astronomers discovered and imaged the exoplanet in 2017 using the European Southern Observatory's Very Large Telescope in Chile.
The Webb Space Telescope captured more details of the planet.
NASA said that the new images captured by the Webb Space Telescope demonstrate its powerful infrared band observation capabilities, which can capture worlds beyond the solar system, which points out the direction for future observations of extrasolar planets and helps increase human understanding of the solar system. understanding of exoplanets.
The Webb Space Telescope was jointly developed by NASA, the European Space Agency and the Canadian Space Agency and is considered to be the "successor" of the Hubble Space Telescope.
The telescope was launched from the Kourou Space Center in French Guiana on December 25, 2021, and successfully entered an orbit around the second Lagrangian point of the Sun-Earth system on January 24 this year.
(produced by Xu Miaoqiao)
Responsible editor: [Tian Boqun]