NASA Just Dropped a New Image of an Alien Planet Only 12 Light-Years Away!

A First for the James Webb Space Telescope

This is super exciting because it’s the first time the JWST has imaged an exoplanet that hadn’t already been spotted with ground-based telescopes. Exoplanets, in case you didn’t know, are planets that orbit stars other than our sun. Almost all of the 5,000 known exoplanets have been found indirectly using the transit method, which detects changes in a star’s light as a planet crosses in front of it. But fewer than 25 exoplanets have been directly imaged, which means we actually see them as a bright dot near their star. How cool is that?

Meet Epsilon Indi Ab: The Super Jupiter

So, this ancient world, known as Epsilon Indi Ab, is just 12 light-years from our solar system and is being called a “super Jupiter.” It’s orbiting a bright, sun-like star in the southern constellation Indus, which looks orangey to the naked eye.

Bright and Cold Discovery

Published in Nature, the paper reveals that JWST found a super bright, cold planet with a mass more than six times that of Jupiter! And get this—it has a freezing surface temperature of around 32 degrees Fahrenheit (0 degrees Celsius). That’s much colder than any gas exoplanet we know of so far.

The Magic of an Artificial Eclipse

The researchers used JWST’s MIRI instrument, which is super sensitive to infrared light, making cold objects shine brightly. It also has a coronograph, a disk that can block out the star’s light to create an artificial eclipse. This lets astronomers study the surroundings without the star’s glare getting in the way.

What’s Next for the Researchers?

Indi Epsilon Ab was close enough to us to enable this imaging. The gap between a star and its planet improves with distance, allowing a telescope to see beyond the brightness of the light. What comes next? detecting the light reflected off the planet to determine the composition of its atmosphere and environment.

So here I'll attach the real image of the planet which was given out by NASA