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JWST reveals its first direct image discovery of an exoplanet

(www.smithsonianmag.com)
342 points divbzero | 1 comments | 27 Jun 25 17:44 UTC | HN request time: 0.37s | source
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GMoromisato ◴[27 Jun 25 23:00 UTC] No.44401068[source]▶
In case anyone is wondering, we are (sadly) very far from getting an image of this planet (or any extra-solar planet) that is more than 1 pixel across.

At 110 light-years distance you would need a telescope ~450 kilometers across to image this planet at 100x100 pixel resolution--about the size of a small icon. That is a physical limit based on the wavelength of light.

The best we could do is build a space-based optical interferometer with two nodes 450 kilometers apart, but synchronized to 1 wavelength. That's a really tough engineering challenge.

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1. yongjik ◴[28 Jun 25 06:05 UTC] No.44402585[source]▶
LIGO (the famous gravity wave detector) is made of two 4-kilometer arms. According to its website:

https://www.ligo.caltech.edu/page/facts

> At its most sensitive state, LIGO will be able to detect a change in distance between its mirrors 1/10,000th the width of a proton! This is equivalent to noticing a change in distance to the nearest star (some 4.2 light years away) of the width of a human hair.

So I think two telescopes at 450km distance synchronized to "merely" (haha) a visible light's wavelength should be doable, if we throw a fuckton of money on that.