James Webb Space Telescope wins 'race against time' to directly observe young exoplanet

From the space.com report, "The team's research is published in the Astrophysical Journal." ref - JWST/NIRCam 4–5 μm Imaging of the Giant Planet AF Lep b, https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.3847/2041-8213/ad736a, 04-Oct-2024. "Abstract With a dynamical mass of 3 MJup, the recently discovered giant planet AF Lep b is the lowest-mass imaged planet with a direct mass measurement."

Past reports on this exoplanet are interesting to read too. ELemental abundances of Planets and brown dwarfs Imaged around Stars (ELPIS): I. Potential Metal Enrichment of the Exoplanet AF Lep b and a Novel Retrieval Approach for Cloudy Self-luminous Atmospheres, https://arxiv.org/abs/2309.02488

New era of exoplanet discovery begins with images of 'Jupiter's younger sibling', https://phys.org/news/2023-06-era-exoplanet-discovery-images-jupiter.html

Some geeky exoplanet details for this report: https://exoplanet.eu/catalog/af_lep_b--8595/

Geeking out on exoplanets :)
 
3M Jupiter is awfully big as compared to Earth. This tells me there are a lot of Earth size ones out there.
There are a number of earth size, I used <= 1.1 earth radii for stat purposes.

325 found at the exoplanet.eu site, mean mass 15.75 earths, most are fairly large masses compared to Earth. 281 I found at the NASA archive site. Mean mass about 9.1 earth masses. The exoplanet.eu site shows 5238 exoplanets orbiting with period 370 days or less so a large population, most have large masses too, e.g. mean about 4.31Jupiter masses. JWST directly imaged this 3 Mjup exoplanet in the space.com report.

So far, I have not seen any of the more than 7300 exoplanets confirmed (exoplanet.eu site), have life or ET phoning home on them :)
 
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