Which exoplanet was the first directly imaged by JWST?

HIP 65426 b was the first exoplanet directly imaged by the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST). NASA released the observation in September 2022, marking Webb’s first direct image of a planet beyond our Solar System.

HIP 65426 b is a young gas giant orbiting the star HIP 65426, roughly 350–400 light-years away. It is estimated to have a mass several times greater than Jupiter and lies unusually far from its host star—about 100 times the Earth-Sun distance. That wide separation helped Webb distinguish the planet’s faint infrared glow from the much brighter starlight.

Webb used coronagraphs to block the star’s light and observed the planet through both NIRCam and MIRI. The result was presented in multiple infrared wavelengths, not as a conventional visible-light photograph. The different filters reveal how the planet shines at various infrared energies.

This was not the first direct image of any exoplanet from space: Hubble had previously imaged some planetary companions. The distinction is that HIP 65426 b was Webb’s first directly imaged exoplanet, while other early Webb exoplanet milestones involved detecting or confirming planets through spectroscopy and transit observations.