Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by richardjam73 1233 days ago
If JWST took a picture of LHS 475b then where is the picture? Isn't exoplanet HIP 65426b the first that JWST took a picture of?
1 comments

HIP 65426b is the first exoplanet JWST imaged, but it was previously discovered by VLT-SPHERE, which I believe is also a direct imaging instrument. So it would not be correct to say that JWST took the first pictures of HIP 65426b.

However, JWST was the first instrument to directly observe LHS 475b, also confirming its existence for the first time. As to "where are the pictures?", IIUC these observations were made using a spectrograph instrument that does not produce a picture as such. The results are easy to find on the web with a search engine.

One might say Bard's result is wrong in the sense I have proposed because a spectrograph result isn't a picture. However, given that the prompt explicitly specified that the results should be tailored to a 9 year old, I think that would be pretty disingenuous.