The James Webb Telescope Has Just Found Its First Alien Planet...

Source: Found here

Since its launch in 2021, the James Webb telescope has shed a significant amount of light on the makeup of the early universe, as well as obtain information on exoplanets, which are known planets beyond the Earth's solar system.

Now, though, the telescope has gone a step further, discovering a brand new exoplanet.

Approximately 5,900 exoplanets have been discovered in the last 30 years , but less than 2% of that figure have been directly imaged , making this latest finding all the more remarkable. In many cases, exoplanets are detected indirectly when they cause a star's light to fade slightly by passing in front of it.

Researchers say the newest known exoplanet is a young gas giant planet, similar in size to Saturn , which, with a radius about nine times the size of the Earth's , is our solar system's second biggest planet after Jupiter. Despite that, it is the smallest exoplanet discovered by direct imaging , and is only a tenth of the size of the previous smallest.

The direct image showed the exoplanet orbiting a star smaller than the sun located about 110 light-years from Earth . For reference, one light-year is 5.9 trillion miles.

"Webb (the telescope) opens a new window - in terms of mass and the distance of a planet to the star - of exoplanets that had not been accessible to observations so far," explained astronomer Anne-Marie Lagrange of the French research agency CNRS and LIRA/Observatoire de Paris, the lead author of the study.

"This is important to explore the diversity of exoplanetary systems and understand how they form and evolve".

With that in mind, it is believed the exoplanet could still be gaining mass, which would result in it increasing in size.