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Space telescope «James Webb» for the first time in 3 years of operation directly made image of an exoplanet.
The exoplanet TWA-7b is located at a distance of 111 light years from Earth and has the lowest mass of all such objects directly photographed. So far, out of all 6 thousand exoplanets discovered outside the Solar System, only 80 have been detected by direct observations.
TWA-7b revolves around a young star is only 6 million years old. The mass of this exoplanet is about 100 times that of the Earth and is about 30% of the mass of Jupiter. Astronomers note that the mass of TWA-7b is about 10 times smaller than any other exoplanet that has been observed directly.
TWA-7b — is a cold gas giant that revolves around the parent star at a distance of 52 times the distance from the Earth to the Sun. If this planet were in the solar system, it would be far beyond Pluto’s orbit, somewhere on the very edge.
To see TWA-7b despite the brightness of its parent star, a team of astronomers led by Researcher at the French National Center for Scientific Research Anne-Marie Lagrange used a coronagraph attached to a mid-infrared camera and spectrograph (MIRI). The star TWA 7 is surrounded by a protoplanetary disk. It was there that astronomers discovered the exoplanet TWA-7b.
Since the star TWA 7 is positioned in such a way that its pole is pointing toward the Earth, astronomers were able to see the entire protoplanetary disk of three rings of rocky debris, gas, and dust. The narrowest of the rings is surrounded by the other two. It is in this narrowest ring that the exoplanet TWA-7b is located.
Lagrange and her colleagues note that there is still a «very small chance» that the images show a background galaxy, but the evidence «strongly suggests» that the source is a planet that has not been previously detected.
The very placement of the exoplanet TWA-7b in the inner ring of the protoplanetary disk also interested astronomers. This is the first time astronomers have seen such an exoplanet positioning. According to Langrage, she and her colleagues hope to obtain more data, including information on the composition of TWA-7b’s atmosphere.
The results of the study are published in the journal Nature
Source: engadget