The name HIP 65426 b is a gas giant about six to eight times the size of Jupiter, which is a huge planet. It is only between 15 and 20 million years old, which in planet years is very young. Our own Earth is four to five billion years old.
In 2017, astronomers in Chile, using the SPHERE instrument on the European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope (VLT), imaged HIP 65426 b using short infrared wavelengths of light. Today’s image is taken in mid-infrared light. It reveals much more detail than the ground-based telescopes on the VLT campus. This is due to the intrinsic infrared glow of the Earth’s atmosphere.
Researchers from the NASA/ESA/CSA cooperative are preparing a paper of their observations, which will be submitted to journals for peer review. The fact that these detailed images captured an exoplanet so well is already opening up future possibilities for studying distant worlds.
One of the researchers’ concerns was making sure there was a star associated with the large gas giant, proving that it was indeed an exoplanet and not a dwarf star. Images from the Webb telescope show that HIP 65426 b is close enough to a star to be in its orbit, and is about 100 times farther from that star than Earth is from our own star. The distance from HIP 65426 b to its sun is also sufficient to clearly separate the two in the image.