NASA's James Webb Space Telescope takes its first image of planet outside solar system

The US space agency NASA said on Friday that a direct image of a planet outside of our solar system has been taken using the James Webb telescope.

NASA has made the exoplanet image public, paving the path for next surveys that will provide more details on exoplanets than ever before.

The exoplanet in Webb's photograph, known as HIP 65426 b, is also thought to be between six and twelve times as massive as Jupiter, according to the space agency. In comparison to our 4.5 billion-year-old Earth, it is a young planet, being just roughly 15 to 20 million years old. The same planet was found in 2017 by astronomers who used the SPHERE instrument on the Very Large Telescope of the European Southern Observatory in Chile to capture photos of it.

The intrinsic infrared light of Earth's atmosphere prevents ground-based telescopes from picking up these new details, but Webb's view at longer infrared wavelengths does. With this, Webb's first exoplanet capture offers a preview of potential future research opportunities on other planets.

HIP 65426 b is sufficiently far away from its host star for Webb to be able to distinguish the planet from the star in the image since it is 100 times further away from its host star than Earth is from the Sun.

HIP 65426 b marks the way forward for Webb's exoplanet exploration even though this is not the first direct image of an exoplanet to be taken from space — the Hubble Space Telescope has already captured direct planetary photographs.