- The Webb Space Telescope discovered a gas giant roughly the same diameter as Jupiter but six times its mass, orbiting the nearby star Epsilon A. It could take the planet up to 250 years to complete one revolution around the star.
- The planet and star are about 3.5 billion years old, a billion years younger than our own solar system, but still thought to be older and more luminous than expected.
- The Webb Telescope, launched in 2021, is the largest and most powerful astronomical observatory ever placed in space.
The Webb Space Telescope has discovered a super Jupiter around a nearby star, and it is in a super orbit.
The planet has roughly the same diameter as Jupiter but six times its mass, and like Jupiter, its atmosphere is rich in hydrogen.
The big difference is that this planet takes more than a century, perhaps 250 years, to complete one orbit around its star, and it is 15 times farther away from the star than Earth is.
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Scientists have long suspected that a large planet orbits the star 12 light-years away, but they never expected it to be so massive and so far away — one light-year is 5.8 trillion miles. These new observations reveal that the planet orbits Epsilon Indi A, which is part of a three-star system.
An international team led by Elizabeth Matthews of the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy in Germany collected the images last year and published their findings in the journal Nature on Wednesday.
Astronomers were able to directly observe the incredibly old and cool gas giant by obscuring the star using a special light-blocking device at Webb, a rare and difficult feat: Blocking the star’s light made the planet stand out as a speck in infrared light.
This illustration from the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy shows a cool gas giant orbiting a red dwarf. Scientists have long suspected that a large planet orbits the star Epsilon Indi A, but they never expected it to be so massive and so far away from its host star. (T. Muller (MPIA/HdA) via AP)
The planet and star are 3.5 billion years old, Matthews said, about a billion years younger than our solar system, but still thought to be older and more luminous than expected.
This star is so close to our solar system and so bright that it can be seen with the naked eye in the Southern Hemisphere.
However, please do not risk your life.
“This is a gas giant planet with no solid surface or liquid water oceans,” Matthews said in an email.
It’s unlikely that there are many more gas giants in the solar system, but it’s possible that smaller rocky planets could be lurking, she said.
Jupiter-like worlds could help scientists understand “how these planets evolve over timescales of hundreds of millions of years,” she said.
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The first planets, known as exoplanets, were identified in the early 1990s, and as of mid-July, NASA had counted 5,690. Most were detected through the transit method, a periodic dimming of a star’s light that indicates the presence of an orbiting planet.
Space-based and ground-based telescopes continue to search for more celestial objects, especially planets that may be similar to Earth.
NASA and the European Space Agency’s Webb Telescope, launched in 2021, is the largest and most powerful space-based observatory ever built.
