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.
We can do better than that! Using the Sun as a gravitation lens[1], and a probe at a focal point of 542 AU, we could get 25km scale surface resolution on a planet 98 ly away. [2] This would be an immense and time-consuming endeavor, but does seem to be within humanity's current technological capabilities.
It's linear, so if it is 25 times closer then the telescope can be 25 times smaller. At 4.37 light-years we'd need an 18 kilometer telescope to image at Jupiter-sized planet at 100x100 pixel resolution.
If you only wanted 10x10 resolution you could get by with a 1.8 kilometer telescope.
My (tenuous) understanding of interferometry is that you receive light from two points separated by a baseline and then combine that light in such a way that the wavelengths match up and reinforce at appropriate points.
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.
The depressing, if that's the right word, counterpoint to all the "oh my god it's fun of stars" deep fields crammed with millions of galaxies per square arcsecond is that the expansion of the universe means that nearly all of them are permanently and irrevocably out of reach even with near-lightspeed travel: they'll literally wink out of observable reality before we could ever get to them, leaving only a few nearby galaxies in the sky. At best you can reach the handful of gravitationally-bound galaxies in the local group.
Not that the Milky Way is a small place, but even most sci-fi featuring FTL and all sorts of handwaves has to content itself with shenanigans confined to a single galaxy due to the mindblowing, and accelerating, gaps between galaxies.
It's a shame, but in a glass-falf-full sense the fact that this planet is our little boat in the ocean and all that we got is also a quite helpful focusing reminder and scope constraint.
That the stars are beyond reach might be depressing, how aggresively we are gambling our little boat is on the other hand actively scary and perhaps the dominant limit on humanity's effective reach.
> What an appropriate name for an astrophysicist. I wonder if she's distantly related to the namesake of the Lagrange point.
Scopus has 390 profiles of people named Lagrange. It is not a very popular family name but it is not uncommon either and some of them are bound to end up in academia, whether they are descendants of Joseph-Louis or not.
> Although there is a slight possibility that the newly detected infrared source might be a background galaxy
I understand the difficulty in what they are doing, but the scale of the error here is amusing. “We thing we took a picture of something, but it might have been billions of things much bigger but further away”
This is super exciting. It seems possible to one day receive higher resolution images of this type of find. Perhaps someone who is more familiar with this subject can opine.
The moment we have our first, direct-observation photo of an earth-like exoplanet will be a defining point in our history.
The Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope is supposed to have even better coronagraph as a technology demonstrator. They keep finding ways to improve on the technology.
If it's allowed to continue, which seems very shakey at the moment. NASA's would from DOGE will result in projects - even mostly completed one - being trashed.
> In April 2025, the second Trump administration proposed to cut funding for Roman again as part of its FY2026 budget draft. This was part of wider proposed cuts to NASA's science budget, down to US$3.9 billion from its FY2025 budget of US$7.5 billion. On April 25, 2025, the White House Office of Management and Budget announced a plan to cancel dozens of space missions, including the Roman Space Telescope, as part of the cuts.
That will be done with a solar gravitational lens - there's a recent-ish NASA paper about it. Basically you send your probe to > 550 AU in the opposite direction of your target exoplanet, point it at the Sun and you will get a warped high-res photo of the planet around the Sun. You can then algorithmically decode it into a regular photo.
I think the transit time is likely decades and the build time is also a long time as well. But in maybe 40-100 years we could have plentiful HD images of 'nearby' exoplanets. If I'm still around when it happens I will be beyond hyped.
this is one of those where a missed alignment is going to be a huge bummer. 550AU * arcseconds is a long way off looking not at what you wanted. you wouldn't know until you were at minimum distance which is going to take generations to achieve. voyager 1 is only ~166AU and that was >40 years. so if you try to nudge your coarse, how many more generations would it be before it was aligned correctly?
I really liked the image a lot so I emailed the author of the paper to see if she had a version without the clipart,she didn't but said it was fine to remove it, so: https://s.h4x.club/YEuYLW8z (doesn't render tiffs I guess, so hit download)
The JWST is a marvel of engineering. It is also a machine designed around the restrictions of what the most powerful rockets of the 1990's were capable of. Just imagine how capable future telescopes will be now that we have multiple super-heavy launch vehicles with cavernous payload fairings in development.
Yes, and too bad a twin or two weren't developed simultaneously, as the additional cost would be minimal - and now we have SpaceX rockets to launch them.
My fantasy is that at some point we’ll have a sufficiently powerful telescope to cause a galactic “Van Leeuwenhoek moment” where, just like that discoverer of microbes, we will suddenly see the galaxy swarming with spacecraft.
it's hard to commit to building JWST type of payload around a non-yet proven launcher. you'd want to wait until the "in development" becomes proven before planning to launch some decadal planned mission.
So presumably they'll be able to take another photograph in a year or two and the planet will have visibly moved? (Jupiter's orbital period around the Sun is about 12 years, but this planet is about 10 times further from the star and has an estimated orbital period of 550 years.)
How is it that we can spot a planet 110 light years away, but whether there’s another planet in the solar system past Pluto is a matter of legitimate scientific debate?
Because exoplanets by definition are going to be found adjacent to stars, which limits the area you need to search. Planets are fairly common, so you don't need to look at that many stars before you find evidence of an exoplanet, provided you have a good-enough telescope.
A hypothetical planet beyond Pluto be in a huge part of the sky: Presumably the orbit of such a planet could be inclined about as much as Pluto's. The 17-degree inclination of Pluto's orbit means it could be in a 34-degree wide strip of the sky, which, if I'm doing my math right, is about 29% of the full sky. If we allow for up to a 30 degree inclination, then that's half the sky.
There's also the matter of object size and brightness. The proposed Planet Nine[1] was supposed to be a few hundred AU away, and around the mass of 4 or 5 Earths. The object discovered in this paper is around 100 M🜨, at around 52 AU from its star. Closer and larger. (Of course, there's a sweet spot for exoplanet discovery, where you want the planet to be close enough to be bright, but far enough away to be outside the glare of the star.)
Not sure if you're joking, but in case you're not - the star at the center is usually so bright that its light drowns out the light of anything nearby. In such cases, the star is covered so that the dimmer objects nearby are visible.
And imagine that the only reason, the ONLY reason, they haven’t completely blown us away, is because our planet happens to be one of the very rare planets where the ratio of the size of our moon and earth is in such a way that you can witness a total solar eclipse as a black hole in the sky once a year, and they would like to witness this event someday.
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.
We can do better than that! Using the Sun as a gravitation lens[1], and a probe at a focal point of 542 AU, we could get 25km scale surface resolution on a planet 98 ly away. [2] This would be an immense and time-consuming endeavor, but does seem to be within humanity's current technological capabilities.
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_gravitational_lens
2. https://www.nasa.gov/general/direct-multipixel-imaging-and-s...
I was going to post the same exact thing and links.
Of all the possible space probes or missions we could do. I want this one more than any of them!
Agreed! This might be easier than an interferometer. You just need a lot of delta-v
Do we have a recent cost estimate?
"We used to look up at the sky and wonder at our place in the stars. Now we just look down, and worry about our place in the dirt."
It's cynical to assume OP was gunning for "it's too expensive". They might just want to know the size of the challenge to get it done.
How big would the telescope/mirror/lens need to be to get a picture of something in the Alpha Centauri system, 4.37 light years away?
Also, could the image be created by “scanning” a big area and then composing the image from a bunch of smaller ones?
It's linear, so if it is 25 times closer then the telescope can be 25 times smaller. At 4.37 light-years we'd need an 18 kilometer telescope to image at Jupiter-sized planet at 100x100 pixel resolution.
If you only wanted 10x10 resolution you could get by with a 1.8 kilometer telescope.
Wikipedia has more: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Angular_resolution. The Rayleigh criterion is the equation to calculate this.
L2 is moving though right? Or does it need to be simultaneously receiving at the 2 points?
Sadly, it has to be simultaneous.
My (tenuous) understanding of interferometry is that you receive light from two points separated by a baseline and then combine that light in such a way that the wavelengths match up and reinforce at appropriate points.
Wikipedia has a decent summary: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aperture_synthesis
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.
The depressing, if that's the right word, counterpoint to all the "oh my god it's fun of stars" deep fields crammed with millions of galaxies per square arcsecond is that the expansion of the universe means that nearly all of them are permanently and irrevocably out of reach even with near-lightspeed travel: they'll literally wink out of observable reality before we could ever get to them, leaving only a few nearby galaxies in the sky. At best you can reach the handful of gravitationally-bound galaxies in the local group.
Not that the Milky Way is a small place, but even most sci-fi featuring FTL and all sorts of handwaves has to content itself with shenanigans confined to a single galaxy due to the mindblowing, and accelerating, gaps between galaxies.
It's a shame, but in a glass-falf-full sense the fact that this planet is our little boat in the ocean and all that we got is also a quite helpful focusing reminder and scope constraint.
That the stars are beyond reach might be depressing, how aggresively we are gambling our little boat is on the other hand actively scary and perhaps the dominant limit on humanity's effective reach.
Didn’t China able to shoot lasers to the moon orbit for comms?
Anne-Marie Lagrange, lead author of the study
What an appropriate name for an astrophysicist. I wonder if she's distantly related to the namesake of the Lagrange point. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lagrange_point
Incidentally, although I'd never heard of A-M Lagrange before now, she's had an incredible career: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anne-Marie_Lagrange
> What an appropriate name for an astrophysicist. I wonder if she's distantly related to the namesake of the Lagrange point.
Scopus has 390 profiles of people named Lagrange. It is not a very popular family name but it is not uncommon either and some of them are bound to end up in academia, whether they are descendants of Joseph-Louis or not.
Exactly my thought too, probably nominative determinism striking again
> Although there is a slight possibility that the newly detected infrared source might be a background galaxy
I understand the difficulty in what they are doing, but the scale of the error here is amusing. “We thing we took a picture of something, but it might have been billions of things much bigger but further away”
With time, orbital motion should distinguish the two possibilities.
Though at a 50 AU orbit around a smallish star, that might take a while.
That actually makes one wonder if it will move enough within the lifetime of JWST to actually detect that orbital motion.
[delayed]
This is super exciting. It seems possible to one day receive higher resolution images of this type of find. Perhaps someone who is more familiar with this subject can opine.
The moment we have our first, direct-observation photo of an earth-like exoplanet will be a defining point in our history.
The Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope is supposed to have even better coronagraph as a technology demonstrator. They keep finding ways to improve on the technology.
If it's allowed to continue, which seems very shakey at the moment. NASA's would from DOGE will result in projects - even mostly completed one - being trashed.
China is catching up on optics and launch. The torch of civilisation seems unlikely to be lost if we fuck it up that badly.
I’m not sure why this is downvoted. It’s entirely accurate.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nancy_Grace_Roman_Space_Telesc...
> In April 2025, the second Trump administration proposed to cut funding for Roman again as part of its FY2026 budget draft. This was part of wider proposed cuts to NASA's science budget, down to US$3.9 billion from its FY2025 budget of US$7.5 billion. On April 25, 2025, the White House Office of Management and Budget announced a plan to cancel dozens of space missions, including the Roman Space Telescope, as part of the cuts.
That will be done with a solar gravitational lens - there's a recent-ish NASA paper about it. Basically you send your probe to > 550 AU in the opposite direction of your target exoplanet, point it at the Sun and you will get a warped high-res photo of the planet around the Sun. You can then algorithmically decode it into a regular photo.
I think the transit time is likely decades and the build time is also a long time as well. But in maybe 40-100 years we could have plentiful HD images of 'nearby' exoplanets. If I'm still around when it happens I will be beyond hyped.
FYI: Direct Multipixel Imaging and Spectroscopy of an Exoplanet with a Solar Gravity Lens Mission. https://arxiv.org/abs/2002.11871
this is one of those where a missed alignment is going to be a huge bummer. 550AU * arcseconds is a long way off looking not at what you wanted. you wouldn't know until you were at minimum distance which is going to take generations to achieve. voyager 1 is only ~166AU and that was >40 years. so if you try to nudge your coarse, how many more generations would it be before it was aligned correctly?
an arcsecond at 550AU is "only" 400,125 km. So, in theory, it's correctable in days.
Paper: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-025-09150-4
I really liked the image a lot so I emailed the author of the paper to see if she had a version without the clipart,she didn't but said it was fine to remove it, so: https://s.h4x.club/YEuYLW8z (doesn't render tiffs I guess, so hit download)
The JWST is a marvel of engineering. It is also a machine designed around the restrictions of what the most powerful rockets of the 1990's were capable of. Just imagine how capable future telescopes will be now that we have multiple super-heavy launch vehicles with cavernous payload fairings in development.
Yes, and too bad a twin or two weren't developed simultaneously, as the additional cost would be minimal - and now we have SpaceX rockets to launch them.
My fantasy is that at some point we’ll have a sufficiently powerful telescope to cause a galactic “Van Leeuwenhoek moment” where, just like that discoverer of microbes, we will suddenly see the galaxy swarming with spacecraft.
it's hard to commit to building JWST type of payload around a non-yet proven launcher. you'd want to wait until the "in development" becomes proven before planning to launch some decadal planned mission.
Ariane 5 seems pretty proven to me :D
yeah, nothing says proven like being retired
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CE_Antliae https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-025-09150-4
So presumably they'll be able to take another photograph in a year or two and the planet will have visibly moved? (Jupiter's orbital period around the Sun is about 12 years, but this planet is about 10 times further from the star and has an estimated orbital period of 550 years.)
Do NOT trust my napkin math, but I believe TWA 7 moves ~0.6 "pixels" (0.02 arcsec) per Earth-year.
The star thing made me think "Who's that planetoid?"
edit: but it's the orange thing not the star
How is it that we can spot a planet 110 light years away, but whether there’s another planet in the solar system past Pluto is a matter of legitimate scientific debate?
Because exoplanets by definition are going to be found adjacent to stars, which limits the area you need to search. Planets are fairly common, so you don't need to look at that many stars before you find evidence of an exoplanet, provided you have a good-enough telescope.
A hypothetical planet beyond Pluto be in a huge part of the sky: Presumably the orbit of such a planet could be inclined about as much as Pluto's. The 17-degree inclination of Pluto's orbit means it could be in a 34-degree wide strip of the sky, which, if I'm doing my math right, is about 29% of the full sky. If we allow for up to a 30 degree inclination, then that's half the sky.
There's also the matter of object size and brightness. The proposed Planet Nine[1] was supposed to be a few hundred AU away, and around the mass of 4 or 5 Earths. The object discovered in this paper is around 100 M🜨, at around 52 AU from its star. Closer and larger. (Of course, there's a sweet spot for exoplanet discovery, where you want the planet to be close enough to be bright, but far enough away to be outside the glare of the star.)
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planet_Nine
Because we are looking for much smaller planets.
Why is it censored?
They have to block out the light of the star so that it doesn't overwhelm the light from the planet.
Not sure if you're joking, but in case you're not - the star at the center is usually so bright that its light drowns out the light of anything nearby. In such cases, the star is covered so that the dimmer objects nearby are visible.
Did it come from JPL?
Bunch of liberals.. shakes fist
/s
How cool would it be to directly image artificial light on the "dark side" of a planet (like all the photos you see of lights on earth at night)?
I mean, even if there is life it's like 1 in a gazillion. But you could imagine some ML looking through all of its images to find planets, etc.
Or imagine another civilization looking at our lights with their telescope
And imagine that the only reason, the ONLY reason, they haven’t completely blown us away, is because our planet happens to be one of the very rare planets where the ratio of the size of our moon and earth is in such a way that you can witness a total solar eclipse as a black hole in the sky once a year, and they would like to witness this event someday.
That's no reason not to blow us away, eclipses still work if there are no annoying humans around to see them.