A team of astrophysicists led by Northwestern University in the United States has developed a new computational technique that removes starlight glare from James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) images with unprecedented precision — and revealed a giant exoplanet hidden in two-year-old data. The study was published on 4 November in the journal Nature.
The glare problem
Photographing a planet outside the Solar System is like trying to spot a firefly next to a floodlight: even young giant planets can be 100,000 times fainter than the star they orbit. JWST uses coronagraphs, which block most of the star's light, but some glare still leaks through and forms a pattern that can hide planets. For 20 years, astronomers worked around the problem by observing another star as a reference and subtracting its image — but no telescope stays perfectly still, and the slightest mismatch between the reference and the real observation leaves enough residual glare to hide a planet.
The FLIP 'digital twin'
The new technique, called FLIP (Physics-based Learning for Imaging Planets), drops the reliance on reference photographs. It creates a "digital twin" of the telescope: a virtual replica that simulates how starlight travels through the mirrors and reaches the detectors. Using computational tools similar to those used to train AI models, the team fine-tuned millions of parameters in the digital twin to reproduce the telescope's tiny imperfections — small shifts and distortions in the optics, on the scale of nanometres. The researchers stress that they did not use AI to identify planets: they combined knowledge of the telescope's physics with powerful optimization tools.
The planet revealed
The team tested FLIP on earlier JWST observations of three stars: HIP 65426 and 51 Eridani, which have known planets, and TYC 5899, with no known planetary companions. In every case, the method outperformed conventional techniques, improving sensitivity for detecting faint planets by 2 to 15 times. With that greater sensitivity, FLIP revealed the giant exoplanet 51 Eridani b in data that standard processing could not interpret: carbon dioxide in the planet's atmosphere absorbs light at the infrared wavelength JWST observes, making the signal even fainter. The detection was significant, above 5 sigma.
What comes next
The advance could enable the discovery of smaller, colder and fainter planets without changing the telescopes — just by reprocessing data that already exists. Looking ahead, FLIP could also shape the design of future telescopes, such as NASA's planned Habitable Worlds Observatory, which aims to directly photograph Earth-sized planets around Sun-like stars. Instead of relying only on engineering to keep a telescope stable at the picometre scale, astronomers could correct its imperfections in software. Geekiki has also followed recent Hubble telescope discoveries, such as the study on dwarf galaxies that lost oxygen.
Image credit: Rodrigo Ferrer-Chavez, Northwestern University, via phys.org. Comparison between the standard KLIP method (left) and the new FLIP method (center) in a JWST observation of the star 51 Eridani A.
Sources: phys.org, 4 November 2026; Nature — Ferrer-Chavez et al., “Imaging exoplanets below the telescope stability limit”, DOI: 10.1038/s41586-026-11213-z; Scientific American, 4 November 2026.
Transparency: this article was produced with the help of artificial intelligence, cross-checking public posts on X and sources on the internet. The information was verified against the original sources listed below; consult them to confirm the details.
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