Embargoed until:
Publicly released:
2024-07-25 01:00
Astronomers using the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) have found a six times larger version of Jupiter, a mere 3.6 parsecs away. The ‘super-Jupiter’ is orbiting an approximately 3.5-billion-year-old star that is not far removed from our own Sun. The researchers say the planet is remarkably bright and cold, with temperatures around -16°C and is located around 15 times farther away from its star than we are from ours.
Journal/conference: Nature
Link to research (DOI): 10.1038/s41586-024-07837-8
Organisation/s: Max Planck Institute for Astronomy, Heidelberg, Germany
Funder: Support for program #2243 was provided by NASA through a grant from the Space
Telescope Science Institute, which is operated by the Association of Universities for
Research in Astronomy, Inc., under NASA contract NAS 5-03127. Portions of this research
employed High Performance Computing (HPC) resources supported by the University of
Arizona TRIF, UITS, and Research, Innovation, and Impact (RII) and maintained by the
UArizona Research Technologies department. Part of this research was carried out at the Jet
Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of Technology, under a contract with the National
Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA). The contributions of DP have been carried
out within the framework of the NCCR PlanetS supported by the Swiss National Science
Foundation under grants 51NF40_182901 and 51NF40_205606. This project has received
funding from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon
2020 research and innovation programme (COBREX; grant agreement n° 885593). AML and
FP received funding by PSL/OCAV.
Media release
From: Springer Nature
The discovery of a ‘super-Jupiter’ giant exoplanet orbiting a nearby, approximately 3.5-billion-year-old solar-type star is reported in Nature. The observations, from the JWST, were made owing to previous predictions of a planet orbiting the star. However, the properties of the newly discovered planet differ from previous analyses of this system.Epsilon Indi A, a mere 3.6 parsecs away from Earth, is a main-sequence (hydrogen-burning) star, an orange dwarf that burns at a slightly lower temperature than the Sun (a G-type yellow dwarf). Previous analyses of this star have indicated that it may host a giant planet, but direct observations have been lacking. The direct imaging of a planet by JWST, reported by Elisabeth Matthews and colleagues, offers new insights into the properties of this system.The observed planet is remarkably bright and cold, with a temperature of around 275 K and a mass more than six times that of Jupiter. It is currently located at a projected distance of 15 astronomical units (au; 1 au is the average distance between Earth and the Sun), with a predicted orbital period of at least several decades. The properties of this planet differ from those of a previously predicted ‘planet b’, which led the authors to reassign the b name to the new planet: Eps Ind Ab. The data indicate that this is probably the only giant planet in the system, the authors conclude
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