The newfound planet represents Webb’s first direct image discovery of a planet.
Almost 6,000 exoplanets have been discovered to date. NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope has just added another likely planet to that list: a Saturn-mass planet named TWA 7 b. Astronomers found it by blocking the light of its host star to reveal the hidden planet. It’s located in a gap in one of three dust rings that were discovered around the star TWA 7 by previous ground-based observations. The object’s brightness, color, distance from the star, and position within the ring are consistent with theoretical predictions for a planet that is expected to be sculpting the surrounding debris disk.
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