James Webb Space Telescope Captures Images of Individual Planets in Distant Star System

Astronomers using the mighty James Webb Space Telescope have captured direct images of four planets in a star system 130 light years from Earth — an astonishingly eagle-eyed feat of cosmic photography. The planets, all young gas giants, were spotted in HR 8799, a system that's only around 30 million years old. Though already extensively probed, these latest observations, as detailed in a new study published in The Astrophysical Journal, provide compelling evidence that the nascent worlds are rich in carbon dioxide — a promising sign that they formed in a similar way to the gas giants of our solar system, Jupiter and Saturn. "By spotting these strong carbon dioxide features, we have shown there is a sizable fraction of heavier elements, like carbon, oxygen, and iron, in these planets' atmospheres," lead author William Balmer, an astrophysicist at John Hopkins University, said in a NASA statement. The James Webb Space Telescope imaged young, giant exoplanets and detected carbon dioxid ... Read full article.