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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: 0.467s | 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. gsliepen ◴[28 Jun 25 07:30 UTC] No.44402874[source]▶
If you drop the requirement that the image has to be taken with wavelengths our eyes are sensitive to, you could image it using radio telescopes. We already have this capability, the problem though with radio interferometry is that while you can get an effectively huge aperture, the contrast level will be very low, and I am guessing that after subtracting the signal from the star, the signal from the planet will not be above the noise level. Note that optical interferometers would have the same problem.