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Confirmed – NASA follows in Toyota’s footsteps and adopts hydrogen for its propulsion and energy systems
Confirmed – NASA observes a rare event outside our galaxy and astronomers can’t believe what they see
The Webb Telescope is making headlines again,
as it has captured the first direct image of an extremely cold exoplanet, the mysterious 14 Herculis c, located about 60 light-years from Earth. This gas giant, with a mass seven times that of Jupiter and a temperature around –3 °C (26 degrees Fahrenheit), challenges theories about planet formation.
The photo, obtained with the NIRCam camera and presented at the 246th meeting of the American Astronomical Society,
shows the infrared sensitivity of Webb
and confirms that “icy” planets can also be revealed with their own light. Doesn’t that sound interesting?
Who is 14 Herculis C
14 Herculis c is a star very similar to the Sun located between the bright stars Vega and Arcturus, in the Hercules constellation, 60 light-years from the solar system. If it were in our system, it would be located 1.4 billion kilometres from the sun, an intermediate distance between Saturn and Uranus.
But it’s not the only planet accompanying its star: there is another planet that has been hidden by the black disk in the image (coronagraph) that the James Webb uses to block the star’s light.
A twisted planetary system
That’s right, what has most caught scientists’ attention is the misalignment between the two worlds. Researchers believe that a third planet may have been expelled during the first few million years, altering the orbits we now observe.
Astronomer William Balmer compares the scenario with the youth of our solar system, when gas giants also “swept” away asteroids and redesigned the trajectories of the inner planets. This parallel helps explain why Earth, Mars and Venus ended up where they are.
What do we know about 14 Herculis C?
Unlike most photographed exoplanets, which usually exceed 800 °C, 14 Herculis c is a true cosmic ice cube. Its low temperature implies lower light emission.
This is where Webb’s feat lies: thanks to its 6.5-meter gold-coated mirror and the infrared optics of NIRCam, it can capture the faint thermal radiation escaping from the planet, even at sub-zero temperatures.
How James Webb got the image
In astronomy, directly seeing an exoplanet is like finding a firefly next to a lit lighthouse, to help you understand the magnitude of the discovery. And the colder a planet is, the harder it is to capture images of it.
To do this, the team blocked the star’s light with a coronagraph and accumulated exposure for hours to reveal the planet’s faint glowing dot. Of course, infrared sensitivity was the key to this moment because cold objects mostly emit at wavelengths invisible to the human eye but accessible to Webb.
And now that they’ve achieved this milestone, they’ll be able to keep researching other much older, much colder exoplanets that have never been observed.
What is an exoplanet?
That’s what we call planets that orbit outside the solar system, meaning they have a star that isn’t the Sun but orbit around it. Normally, they are planets that are very far away, and they are harder to observe because their star “hides” them. And no, for now none of them shows proof of life.
Why is it important?
Because until now all the exoplanets were warm, until 14 Herculis c arrived and showed that old, bigger and especially cold exoplanets also exist!
And the implications are some of our favourites: temperate worlds could form that develop liquid water. And you already know what water means.
One more step in planetary astronomy thanks to the incredible James Webb, more planets similar to our solar system in this vast and amazing galaxy. Who knows if the next NASA news is that they’ve found signs of life? Oh, how exciting!
