I wonder why they show a cropped photo in the article.

"The two planets are visible as two bright dots in the centre (TYC 8998-760-1b) and bottom right (TYC 8998-760-1c) of the frame. Other bright dots, which are background stars, are visible in the image as well. By taking different images at different times, the team were able to distinguish these planets from the background stars. "

Direct Multipixel Imaging and Spectroscopy of an Exoplanet with a Solar Gravity Lens Mission

https://arxiv.org/abs/1802.08421

...and an excellent video someone made about that paper:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NQFqDKRAROI

https://www.csail.mit.edu/news/imaging-method-uses-shadows-r...

The problem here is the complexity of the room in between and the background. As in- light deformed by gravity lenses etc. - but in theory alot more can be extracted from the "noise" in the neighbouring pixels.

Is it not just that easy?

Principal Investigator: Leigh Fletcher

PI Institution: University of Leicester

Title: Extreme Events on Gas Giants: Impacts and Storm Eruptions

Allocation: 10.4 hours allocation change history

I bet those 10.4 hours are planned down to the millisecond.

Sure, there's a ton we don't know yet about Jupiter and Saturn...but for reference Juno cost 0.1x the amount of the JWT and observed Jupiter from one million times closer [0]. Is the JWT really the most economical way to make these observations?

[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Juno_(spacecraft)

I don't know the first thing about how any of this works, but that would be my first guess.

In general, these types of flagship facilities (JWST, Hubble, etc.) are funded by the government (via NASA in the US). In some cases, larger ground-based observatories (e.g., Keck, Large Binocular Telescope) are funded by a combination of private consortia (consisting of foundations and public/private universities) and competitively awarded scientific grants (e.g., from the National Science Foundation, in the US).

The operations are generally paid for by the above sources. Researchers apply for time through a competitive proposal process where ideas for using the facility are collected and evaluated, with proposals awarded telescope time based on scientific merit and technical feasibility. Sometimes, particularly for investigators located in the US working with space telescope data, funding is awarded to the investigating team along with the telescope time. This funding is used to support the analysis of the collected data (e.g., to hire faculty/postdoctoral researchers/students, purchase computers, etc.). For ground-based facilities, researchers often apply for funding from the National Science Foundation to support the analysis of their data.

I'm nervous just thinking about getting to that first operation and the crazy set of steps that need to be perfect on the way.

> TYC 8998-760-1 b is a gas giant exoplanet which has a mass 14 times that of Jupiter, and a radius of 3 RJ. It orbits at a distance of 162 AU (2.42×1010 km; 1.51×1010 mi), or slightly more than 5 times the Neptune-Sun distance.[5][7] In July 2021, astronomers reported the detection, for the first time, of an isotope in the atmosphere of an exoplanet; more specifically, the isotope Carbon-13 (C13) was found in the atmosphere.[8][9]

Though it's not Earth-like, we have already got some data on exoplanets using spectroscopy.

"Overwhelmingly Large Telescope": https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overwhelmingly_Large_Telesco...

The GBT monster, the king of the telescopes at the Green Bank Observatory in West Virginia -- I always think of it as the "Great Big Telescope": https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Green_Bank_Telescope

A radio telescopes, sure, like the Very Large Array... but the next such instrument up is simply the "Square Kilometer Array", reflecting (!) the total area of all if the array elements.

(I lobbied for naming it the SRSLY, but these international consortiums can be a tough audience to calibrate; they were sick of me by the end of the conference.)

We need Douglas Adams to name a few of these.

And then, the SKA was split in two: half in Australia, and half in South Africa.

So it didn't hold up at all, but at the time, it was fun.

BBT - big beautiful telescope

SHT - seriously humongous telescope

WTF - wide-aperture telescope fleet

In retrospect it's of course very clear from the headline itself.