For the first time since its 2021 launch, NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) has discovered a previously unknown alien world. The space observatory directly captured the image of a young gas giant, similar in size to Saturn, orbiting a small star about 110 light-years from Earth in the constellation Antlia.
This planet, officially designated TWA 7 B, is the smallest ever found through direct imaging—roughly ten times less massive than the previous record holder. It orbits its star, TWA 7, at a distance 52 times greater than the Earth-sun distance, far beyond the reach of traditional detection methods like the transit technique, which observes the dimming of a star as a planet passes in front of it.
The Webb team used a French-designed coronagraph attached to the telescope’s Mid-Infrared Instrument (MIRI) to block out the star’s light and capture the faint signal from the distant planet. Astronomer Anne-Marie Lagrange, who led the study published in Nature, highlighted the importance of this breakthrough, noting that Webb’s precision opens up new possibilities for studying distant and low-mass exoplanets.
This infant planetary system—only 6 million years old—also features a well-defined protoplanetary disk, observed from a top-down angle, allowing researchers to map out two large dusty rings and a narrower ring where the planet resides. The star and its planet are mere newborns when compared to our solar system’s 4.5-billion-year history.
While this discovery doesn’t bring us closer to finding Earth-like planets or signs of life, it marks a leap forward in our understanding of how planetary systems form and evolve.