JWST gets best view yet of planet in hotly pursued star system

Thank you. It was an extremely confusing statement.

I would have gone with something like "a wavelength about 7 to 40 times longer than the longest wavelength human eyes can perceive", or "longer wavelengths than a night vision scope picks up, but shorter than most thermal imagers capture or microwave ovens emit". But really, it might make more sense to have just omitted everything after "mid-infrared wavelengths of light". Kind of like the unnecessary use earlier in the article of both parsecs and light-years. Just go with light-years IMO.

I suspect it's a measurement and not a photo. Something they could put on a chart but that's about it.

There's interesting ideas for imaging exo-planets that involve a fleet of satellites past pluto that use the gravity lens of the sun as their lens. A system like that could get an image of an exo-planet.

To ease the disappointment, here's an unrelated jwst image that was released today: https://esawebb.org/images/potm2303a/

Which is really all I want to see. A picture and a paragraph describing it.

"Article I wrote but copied from somewhere else and left out most of the important information, images, video, etc.. and didn't link to the canonical source and then jumped to some conclusions or put a spin on it" is like a bread and butter staple of web journalism. Always frustrating, and so many publications have actively switched to making almost all their stories fit into that model.

I guess if you could get a probe up to 0.1c (project orion), that's only 390 + 39 years to get direct images from within the solar system. But in 390 + 39 years, I assume imaging from our own solar system will have gotten significantly better making direct imaging possibly unnecessary.