James Webb Telescope captures planet that takes 100 years to orbit its star

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Radio Bamba Editorial

| July 28, 2024

This week, scientists announced the discovery of an extremely long-orbiting planet, Epsilon Ende Ab, located 12 light-years from Earth. The exoplanet (planet outside our solar system) has roughly the same diameter as Jupiter, but is six times as massive. Its atmosphere is also rich in hydrogen, like our own gas giant.

But one big difference is that Epsilon Ende Ab takes more than 100 years, and maybe even 250 years, to complete one orbit around its star. It is also much farther away from its star, about 15 times the distance of Earth from the sun.

Scientists have long suspected that a large planet orbits this star. However, it was neither as massive nor as far from its star as previously thought. With new observations, it has been confirmed that Epsilon Indi Ab is indeed orbiting its star Epsilon Indi A, part of a triple-star system.

An international team led by the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy in Germany collected the images last year and published the results in the scientific journal Nature.

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Astronomers were able to see the planet directly by blocking the star’s light with a special shading device on the James Webb Super Telescope. With the star’s light blocked, the planet appeared as a tiny dot of infrared light.

The planet and star are 3.5 billion years old, a billion years younger than our solar system, but still considered ancient and brighter than expected.

The star is so close and bright to our solar system that it can be seen with the naked eye in the Southern Hemisphere.

“This is a gas giant that doesn’t have a solid surface or oceans of liquid water,” astronomer Elizabeth Matthews told The Associated Press. It’s unlikely that this solar system will host more gas giants, she said, but it’s possible that there are small, rocky worlds lurking there.

Jupiter-like worlds could help scientists understand “how these planets evolve over timescales of gigayears,” the astronomer said.

The first planets outside our solar system were confirmed in the early 1990s, and NASA, the North American space agency, now has 5,690 as of mid-July. The vast majority of them have been discovered via the transit method, in which a fleeting dip in a star’s light, which occurs at regular intervals, signals the presence of an orbiting planet.