It's rare for any observatory to directly image a planet beyond our solar system, called an exoplanet, but the powerful James Webb Space Telescope has captured four of them in the stellar system HR 8799.

In 2022, the Webb telescope detected unequivocal evidence of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere of a distant exoplanet called WASP-39b. But that detection was made indirectly, so the latest accomplishment newly validates the telescope’s ability to spot the gas in distant star systems.