[Tee tiong huat]

The James Webb Space Telescope achieved a rarity — snapping an image of a planet beyond our solar system. The exoplanet, Epsilon Indi Ab, is located 12 light-years away. That's trillions of miles, but right next door, cosmically speaking. The world is somewhat like the gas giant Jupiter, but twice as massive. (For reference, "If Earth were the size of a grape, Jupiter would be about as big as a basketball," NASA notes.)

"This discovery is exciting b'cos, planet is quite similar to Jupiter — it's a little warmer, is more massive, but more similar to Jupiter than any other planet has been imaged so far," Elisabeth Matthews, a scientist at Max Planck Institute for Astronomy who led research, said in a statement. The research was published in the science journal Nature.

The Webb telescope, the most powerful space observatory ever built, used a coronagraph to capture the faint light from this far-off planet. A coronagraph blocks light from a specific star while capturing an image. This allows light from the nearby exoplanet to reach Webb.

"Directly detecting planets around other stars is no easy feat," NASA explains. "Even the nearest stars are still so far away that their planets appear to be separated by a fraction of the width of a human hair held at arm’s length. At these tiny angular scales, the planet’s faint light is lost in the glare of its host star when trying to observe it."