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The James Webb Space Telescope’s snapshots of a giant world orbiting another star show that the observatory is performing even better than expected and that its best exoplanet images are yet to come
Get to know our nearest stars, their distances in light-years, spectral types and their known planets.
“The Sun is 10 billion times brighter than an Earth-like planet around it, so that’s a lot of light you have to suppress if you want to see an orbiting planet. A K star might be ‘only’ a billion times brighter than an Earth orbiting around it,” said Giada Arney of NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center. And, they live a very long time—17 billion to 70 billion years, compared to 10 billion years for the Sun—giving plenty of time for life to evolve. Also, K stars have less extreme activity in their youth than the universe’s dimmest stars, called M stars or “red dwarfs.”
ksuadminFebruary 15, 2021 11 The dream of directly visualizing planets like Earth outside of the solar system got a little closer with a new technique developed by an international group of astronomers. As a demonstration, they have used it to study the Alpha Centauri system (which is closest to us, 4.3 light-years from here) and may already have found a planet there. The project, called NEAR (English acronym for New Lands in the Alfa Centauri region) involved installing updates for one of the VLT instruments, the Very Large Telescope, in Chile. The mid-infrared camera received a new coro...