Imaging exoplanets below the telescope stability limit.

A physics-based starlight subtraction method for JWST NIRCam coronagraph imaging achieves 2–15× higher sensitivity than standard techniques, enabling the first 4.3 μm detection of 51 Eridani b.

• Why it matters: Direct exoplanet imaging is limited by residual starlight suppression when telescope instabilities differ between reference and science frames, restricting how many planets can be characterized.
• What they did: The approach uses multistep optimization with a flexible physical model and automatic differentiation to fit and compensate instrument instabilities, optimizing millions of parameters on JWST NIRCam coronagraph observations.
• The result: On-sky results show sensitivity improvements of 2–15× versus standard methods and demonstrate 51 Eridani b at 4.3 μm, suggesting the framework could relax stability requirements for future observatories.

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