He Webb Space Telescope has discovered a planet superjovian orbiting a neighboring star, and its orbit is extraordinary.
The planet is about the same diameter as Jupiter, but has six times its mass. Its atmosphere is also rich in hydrogen, like Jupiter’s.
One big difference: This planet takes more than a century, possibly as long as 250 years, to orbit its star. It is 15 times farther from its star than Earth is from the Sun.
Scientists have long suspected that a large planet was orbiting the star 12 light-years away, but they didn’t think it was that big or that far from its star. One light-year is equal to 5.8 trillion miles (9.28 trillion kilometers). These new observations show that the planet orbits the star Epsilon Indi A, which is part of a three-star system.
An international team led by Elisabeth Matthews of the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy in Germany collected the images last year and published them Wednesday in the journal Nature.
Astronomers directly observed this incredibly old and cold gas giant — a rare and complicated feat — by masking the star using a special shading device on the Webb telescope. By blocking the star’s light, the planet stood out as a point of infrared light.
According to Matthews, the planet and star are 3.5 billion years old, which is 1 billion years younger than our own solar system, but they are still considered older and brighter than expected.
The star is so close to our solar system and so bright that it is visible to the naked eye in the southern hemisphere.
But there is no guarantee that there is life on Super Jupiter.
“It is a gas giant with no hard surface or oceans of liquid water.”Matthews explained in an email.
According to Matthews, this solar system is unlikely to host more gas giants, but there could be small rocky worlds.
Jupiter-like planets can help scientists understand “how these planets evolve over gigayear timescales,” he says.
The first planets outside our solar system—called exoplanets—were confirmed in the early 1990s. In mid-July, the POT There were 5,690 planets in the system. The vast majority were detected using the transit method, in which a brief dimming of starlight, repeated at regular intervals, indicates the existence of a planet in orbit.
Space and ground-based telescopes are on the hunt for more planets, especially those that might be similar to Earth.
Launched in 2021, NASA and the European Space Agency’s Webb telescope is the largest and most powerful astronomical observatory ever placed in space.