The temperature on its surface is on average around zero.
Using the James Webb telescope, astronomers found near Earth, the coldest known exoplanet. The planet, called Eps Ind Ab, is about six times more massive than our Jupiter and is located 12 light years from Earth – close in cosmic terms.
Eps Ind Ab orbits a red dwarf and is located about 4.5 billion kilometers from its star, about the same distance as Neptune from the Sun. One orbit of the planet takes about 200 Earth years.
The surface temperature of Eps Ind Ab averages 0 degrees Celsius. The exoplanet owes its low temperature to its large distance from the star, which also makes it very difficult to detect such worlds.
As Space.com explains, exoplanets are found in two ways: either by measuring the effect an exoplanet has on its star, or by having an exoplanet block the light of its star from Earth. Both methods work poorly for planets that are very far from their stars.
In the case of Eps Ind Ab, it was only on the second attempt that the exoplanet’s orbit was correctly determined. At first, the researchers studied only a small fragment of the exoplanet’s orbit and decided that it made one orbit in 43 Earth years. When the exoplanet was not found in the calculated location at the right moment, it became clear that it had a different orbit.
Eps Ind Ab looks something like this
There are likely cooler exoplanets in the universe, but they are currently extremely difficult to detect with the instruments available to scientists. Eps Ind Ab’s record will almost certainly be broken over time.
