Welcome Guest! You are here: Home » Science & Technology

JWS Telescope discovers Exoplanet not previously known

In its first, astronomers using James Webb Telescope have discovered an Exoplanet nor previously known, American space agency NASA said.

Friday June 27, 2025 0:26 AM, Science Desk

[Representative image.]

Washington: In its first, astronomers using James Webb Telescope have discovered an Exoplanet nor previously known, American space agency NASA said.

The new exoplanet is of mass similar to Saturn and orbiting the young nearby star TWA 7.

Exoplanets are planets beyond our solar system. Since its launch in 2021, JWS Telescope has sent important data on various already-known exoplanets.

If confirmed, this would represent Webb’s first direct image discovery of a planet, and the lightest planet ever seen with this technique outside the solar system.

The international team detected a faint infrared source in the disk of debris surrounding TWA 7 using Webb’s MIRI (Mid-Infrared Instrument).

"The distance between the source and TWA 7 is estimated to be about 50 times the distance of Earth from the Sun. This matches the expected position of a planet that would explain key features seen in the debris disk", NASA said about the results published Wednesday, June 25 in the journal Nature.

Most of the roughly 5,900 exoplanets discovered since the 1990s have been detected using indirect methods, such as through observation of the slight dimming of a star’s light when a planet passes in front of it, called the transit method. Less than 2% of them have been directly imaged, as Webb did with the newly identified planet.

While there is a very small chance that it is a background galaxy, the evidence strongly points to the source being a previously undiscovered planet.

"Saturn-mass planet"

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’s 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.

"Our 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," said Anne-Marie Lagrange, CNRS researcher at the Observatoire de Paris-PSL and Université Grenoble Alpes in France, lead author of the paper.

“This observatory enables us to capture images of planets with masses similar to those in the solar system, which represents an exciting step forward in our understanding of planetary systems, including our own,” added co-author Mathilde Malin of Johns Hopkins University and the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore.

Initial analysis suggests that the object — referred to as TWA 7 b — could be a young, cold planet with a mass around 0.3 times that of Jupiter (about 100 Earth masses, or one Saturn mass) and a temperature near 120 degrees Fahrenheit (47 degrees Celsius).

Follow ummid.com WhatsApp Channel for all the latest updates.

Select Language To Read in Urdu, Hindi, Marathi or Arabic.

 

....

..