James Webb Space Telescope's discovery of Saturn-like planet is total flex of its imaging power
If confirmed, the planet orbiting star TWA 7 will be Webb’s first direct image discovery of a low-mass planet and the lightest ever seen using high-contract imaging.
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Astronomers continue to expand the opportunities of discovery using NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope, and the recent findings of a possible Saturn twin is another first for the powerful instrument.
A team of astronomers used Webb’s Mid-Infrared Instrument to detect the faint source of light within the debris surrounding a 6.4-million-year-old star known as TWA 7, according to a new study published Wednesday in the journal Nature. What’s exciting about this faint signal is that its brightness, color and distance from its star match theoretical predictions for a young, cold Saturn-mass planet.
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"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, lead author of the paper and CNRS researcher at the Observatoire de Paris-PSL and Université Grenoble Alpes.
This image combines ground-based data from ESO’s Very Large Telescope (VLT) and data from Webb’s MIRI (Mid-Infrared Instrument), light from the star TWA 7 has been subtracted. The star is marked by a star and the orange glow to the upper right is the planet candidate.
(NASA, ESA, CSA, Anne-Marie Lagrange (CNRS, UGA), Mahdi Zamani (ESA/Webb) / NASA)
To find this hidden planet within the debris disk, the researchers used MIRI’s coronagraph to suppress the bright light of the host star to search for any faint nearby objects. According to NASA, this technique is called high-contract imaging and allows astronomers to find objects like exoplanets that would otherwise be completely washed out by the light from their host stars.
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The image above is a combination of ground-based observations from ESO’s Very Large Telescope and data from Webb’s Mid-Infrared Instrument. The star is marked with a circle and a star symbol; the bright orange spot to the right of the star is the possible planet dubbed TWA 7b within the debris disc.
According to the study, TWA 7b has a mass about the same as Saturn and a temperature of around 120 degrees Fahrenheit.
If confirmed, the planet orbiting star TWA 7 will be Webb’s first direct image discovery of a low-mass planet and the lightest ever seen using high-contract imaging. More observations will hopefully confirm the planet candidate.