A new photo of a planet beyond our solar system just dropped.
Wang was part of the Webb team that produced the exoplanet images.
That’s a great question. So it comes down to kind of to two things. One is we have detected thousands of exoplanets, but only a handful of them can be directly imaged because we can only see and take pictures of the youngest exoplanets. So this planet is only a few million years old, whereas the Earth is 4.5 billion years old. So it’s a 1,000 times younger. It’s so young that it formed after the dinosaurs went extinct. And because it’s so young, it’s actually glowing hot from its formation.
In terms of the challenges of imaging an exoplanet, I’m sure there must be many, but what are some of the chief challenges? So we do have to use a little bit image processing but we also take advantage of the Webb. The optics of the Webb were designed specifically to image exoplanets. It has a series of optics built in it called coronagraphs. And these are designed to kind of block out the light of the star as much as possible so that we could see the faint light of the planet. But usually that’s not enough. What we have to do is then also do image processing after the fact to discern these faint planets.
What we can do is basically measure the brightness of the planet at different wavelengths and one of the things you can do is add up the planet’s brightness at all the different wavelengths to kind of measure the total energy budget of the planet. Another thing we can do is look for wavelengths where the planet is slightly fainter than we expect compared to the other wavelengths.
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