A planet caught in the act? 🪐 Astronomers using esawebb may have spotted something extraordinary: a Saturn-mass planet, TWA 7b, orbiting a nearby young star. If confirmed, this could be Webb’s very first direct image of a planet and the lightest one ever captured using this method. Swipe through to discover how Webb revealed this hidden world. Using its mid-infrared instrument, scientists blocked out the glare of the star TWA 7 to search for faint signals nearby. Thanks to this clever technique, they detected a soft glow that matches what we’d expect from a young, cold planet. The planet appears to sit inside a gap in a dusty disc surrounding the star, likely carved out by its gravitational pull. That glowing orange dot close to the centre? That’s the likely planet. A more distant orange speck is just a background star. With around 100 times the mass of Earth and temperatures near 47°C, this possible planet offers a rare look at planetary systems taking shape. These early findin...