'Super-Jupiter': Giant gas planet discovered by space telescope

25 July 2024

The James Webb Space Telescope has discovered a new planet in a triple star system only 12 light-years away from Earth. The exoplanet - which means any planet beyond our solar system - is called Epsilon Indi Ab, or Eps Ind Ab for short.

It lives up to its status as a gas giant, with a mass more than six times the size of Jupiter, which is the biggest planet in our solar system.

The discovery of Eps Ind Ab is the first time that a planet has been 'imaged' (photographed) directly from space, without being spotted from a telescope on Earth first.

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Gas giants, like Jupiter, Saturn and Eps Ind Ab, are large planets that don't have a hard crust of solid ground like the Earth has. Instead, they're made of mostly helium gas, hydrogen gas, or both, which swirls around a solid core. So, even if we were able to travel to Eps Ind Ab in the future, we wouldn't be able to land a spacecraft on it.

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