JWST has observed its first exoplanet, getting direct images of a super-Jupiter across multiple wavelengths , and showing the promise the huge space observatory has for exoplanet science. The planet’s host star is called HIP 65426 , a bright star — nearly naked-eye visible — in the constellation of Centaurus. It’s about 350 light-years away from us, and what’s called an A-type star: more massive, hotter, and more luminous than the Sun. It’s very young, something like 14 million years old. The planet, called HIP 65426b, was discovered in 2017 using images from the mighty Very Large Telescope (or VLT) equipped with the SPHERE camera . Initial observation indicated it’s pretty far out from its star, about 16.5 billion kilometers. That’s 110 times the Earth-Sun distance, or nearly four times farther out than Neptune is from the Sun.…