The James Webb Space Telescope has captured its first direct images of carbon dioxide in a planet outside the solar system in HR 8799, a multiplanet system 130 light-years away that has long been a key target for planet formation studies.

For years, astronomers have sought a way to directly observe the atmospheres of exoplanets, worlds orbiting distant stars. Unlike indirect detection methods, such as transit observations or radial velocity measurements,

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.