I am curious. What happens if they aim this telescope at some of the closer exo planets? Would we get images with atmospheres and such? Excuse the excitement, but that would be so cool!
> Webb will also carry coronagraphs to enable direct imaging of exoplanets near bright stars. The image of an exoplanet would just be a spot, not a grand panorama, but by studying that spot, we can learn a great deal about it. That includes its color, differences between winter and summer, vegetation, rotation, weather...How is this done? The answer again is spectroscopy.
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:HR_8799_Orbiting_Exo...
Of course the above doesn’t account for lensing and who knows what else, but you get the idea. (If my math is correct)
So even though the JWST is a larger scope, Hubble's visible wavelength photos are higher resolution than JWST's longer wavelength photos.
In a lot of cases, we infer the presence of planets by making very precise measurements of relative velocities of stars (using red/blue shift of light) and making note of periodic wobbles that indicate that its position is being affected by planets.