JWST reveals its first direct image discovery of an exoplanet

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.

Yet another reminder that space is huge and no matter how big we can imagine, due to the realities of physics, there is a good chance that we might never be able to reach the far stars and galaxies.

There was an article I saw about how long it would take the fastest spacecraft built with "non-speculative" physics - phenomena that has actually been observed in labs or in nature, ignoring any manufacturing and budget infeasibility (as in no handwaving sci-fi) and we're still talking like an entire lifetime to the next star.

In a way we're kind of still like an ancient village who can only travel by boats made of reeds