The star Epsilon in the constellation Indus visible in the southern hemisphere sky is Epsilon Indi Ab. Epsilon Indy is a special product. A system with a reddish main sequence star about the same age as the Sun, but slightly smaller and cooler, two brown dwarfs (“baked stars”) and a giant gas planet orbiting it. MIRI, the James Webb Space Telescope’s mid-infrared instrument, was now looking in that direction.
A brown dwarf is a celestial body that lies between planets and stars: it is larger than planets, smaller than stars, and has not even begun hydrogen fusion in its core – its little light is provided by deuterium fusion.
Ezek az objektumok elég hűvösek lehetnek ahhoz is, hogy metánlégkörük alakulhasson ki.
the JWST Now to the gas giant planet I looked at it. According to its registration certificate and measurements, if an alien were to look at our solar system from afar, using a similar device, they would see our planet Jupiter as we see Epsilon Ende Up.
the Based on measurements The planet is colder than any known exoplanet, at just 2 degrees Celsius, so it's about 100 degrees Celsius hotter than our gas giants. And while we've already found several exoplanets, this is the first one that can be compared to the celestial bodies in our own solar system.
The James Webb Space Telescope has taken a direct image of an exoplanet several times larger than Jupiter using its coronagraph — that is, covering the star so that its light doesn’t overwhelm the planet. Previously, we’ve observed exoplanets that are young, and therefore still very hot.
However, as the planet ages, it loses its temperature, making it harder to see with infrared instruments. Epsilon Ende Ab is cooler than any exoplanet observed so far, and was the only brown dwarf wandering through interstellar space with a lower temperature.
Astronomers have been posing planets in this system for decades, but there have been fake planets around Epsilon Indi in Star Trek In its episodes, but also in novels and video games such as network “The site was also a location,” said Caroline Morley, a member of the research team. “It’s exciting to finally be able to see the planet with our own eyes and even measure its properties.”
The planet's presence was hinted at by fluctuations in the motion of its parent star, which is why the research group chose it as a target to observe. However, the planet turned out to be not quite what they expected: it orbits slightly farther from its star and has twice the mass.
Its atmosphere also looks a bit different than the model calculations predicted. Although researchers don’t have a lot of atmospheric observation data at the moment, they think there could be a lot of methane, carbon monoxide, and carbon dioxide in it. It could also be very cloudy.
Based on what they have just discovered, the researchers naturally want to make more observations in the future, so that they can discover additional properties of Epsilon Indi Ab, for example by examining the color image.
