Webb Captures Its First Direct Image of an Exoplanet

Jun 27, 2025

Jeremy Gray

A bright star at the center with a blue halo, surrounded by two glowing orange dots against a black background representing exoplanets orbiting the star. — ‘Astronomers using NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope have captured compelling evidence of a planet with a mass similar to Saturn orbiting the young nearby star TWA 7. In this image combining ground-based data from ESO’s Very Large Telescope (VLT) and data from Webb’s MIRI (Mid-Infrared Instrument), light from the star TWA 7 has been subtracted. The location of the star is marked with a circle and a star symbol at the center of the image. The blue color represents data from the VLT’s SPHERE instrument, which showcases the location of the disk surrounding the host star. MIRI data is shown in orange. The bright orange spot to the upper right of the star is the source identified as TWA 7 b, within the debris disk. The more distant orange spot visible in the left of the image is an unrelated background star.’ | Credit: NASA, ESA, CSA, Anne-Marie Lagrange (CNRS, UGA), Mahdi Zamani (ESA/Webb)

NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope has captured what scientists believe is its first photograph of an exoplanet. If the findings are confirmed, it would mark the first time Webb discovered a planet through a direct image and the lightest planet ever seen using this imaging technique outside the solar system.

An international team of researchers used Webb’s Mid-Infrared Instrument (MIRI) to image TWA 7, a young nearby star, located a planet-like object, TWA 7 b, with a mass similar to Saturn (about 95 Earths) in its orbit. The team’s incredible research was published this week in Nature.

“Using MIRI’s coronagraph, the researchers carefully suppressed the bright glare of the host star to reveal faint nearby objects. This technique, called high-contrast imaging, enables astronomers to directly detect planets that would otherwise be lost in the overwhelming light from their host star,” NASA explains.

Once the team subtracted residual starlight through imaging processing techniques, a very faint infrared source remained near TWA 7. After extensive work, the team ruled out the possibility that the object is in the solar system and described the chance that it is a background galaxy as “very small.”

“The evidence strongly points to the [infrared] source being a previously undiscovered planet,” NASA says.

The newly discovered infrared source is located in a gap within one of the three dust rings surrounding TWA 7. While ground-based observations have previously observed the star, Webb is uniquely able to block out the starlight to see faint nearby objects.

A false-color astronomical image shows a bright circular disk with concentric rings labeled R1, R2, and R3, and a marked object labeled CC#1; dotted circles and a north arrow are also visible. — In this image, CC #1 is the location of the believed exoplanet. | Credit: Anne-Marie Lagrange et al

TWA 7 b’s “brightness, color, distant from the star, and position within the ring are consistent with theoretical predictions for a young, cold, Saturn-mass planet that is expected to be sculpting the surrounding debris disk,” NASA continues.

“Our observations reveal a strong candidate for a planet shaping the structure of the TWA 7 debris disk, and its position is exactly where we expected to find a planet of this mass,” explains Anne-Marie Lagrange, CNRS researcher at the Observatoire de Paris-PSL and Université Grenoble Alpes in France, and lead author of the new research paper.

“This observatory enables us to capture images of planets with masses similar to those in the solar system, which represents an exciting step forward in our understanding of planetary systems, including our own,” adds co-author Mathile Malin from Johns Hopkins University and the Space Telescope Science Institute (STScI) in Baltimore, Maryland.

 Image credits: NASA, ESA, CSA, Anne-Marie Lagrange (CNRS, UGA), Mahdi Zamani (ESA/Webb)