A massive planet has been discovered by the Webb Space Telescope. This planet, similar in size to Jupiter but with six times its mass, has an atmosphere abundant in hydrogen. Unlike Jupiter, this newly discovered planet takes more than a century to complete one orbit around its star, which is 15 times farther away than Earth’s distance from the sun. Scientists had long speculated about a large planet orbiting this star, located 12 light-years from Earth, but they did not expect it to be so massive and distant. These findings reveal that the planet orbits the star Epsilon Indi A, part of a three-star system.

The Max Planck Institute for Astronomy led an international team to collect images of the planet by using a special shading device on the Webb telescope that blocked starlight to make the planet visible. The planet and its star are estimated to be 3.5 billion years old, making them younger than our solar system but still quite ancient. Despite its proximity and brightness, which made it visible to the naked eye in the Southern Hemisphere, the planet is deemed uninhabitable due to its lack of a solid surface or liquid water. Scientists believe this system may still harbor small rocky planets. The discovery of exoplanets, planets outside our solar system, began in the early 1990s, and NASA’s count now stands at 5,690 as of mid-July. Both space and ground-based telescopes continue to search for more exoplanets, particularly those that might resemble Earth. Launched in 2021, the Webb telescope remains the most powerful astronomical observatory ever placed in space.