super Jupiter Archives

September 17, 2024September 17, 2024 by Matt Williams

Astronomers Have Found a Star with a Hot Jupiter and a Cold Super Jupiter in Orbit

Artist's vision of a cold super-Jupiter in the HD 118203 system. It is an extremely massive gas planet orbiting its star in an orbit six times that of Earth. Credit: NCU/ Maciejewski, G. et al (2024)

Located in the constellation Ursa Major, roughly 300 light-years from Earth, is the Sun-like star HD 118203 (Liesma). In 2006, astronomers detected an exoplanet (HD 118203 b) similar in size and twice as massive as Jupiter that orbits very closely to Liesma (7% of the distance between Earth and the Sun), making it a “Hot Jupiter.” In a recent study, an international team of astronomers announced the detection of a second exoplanet in this system: a Super Jupiter with a wide orbit around its star. In short, they discovered a “Cold Super-Jupiter” in the outskirts of this system.

July 27, 2024July 27, 2024 by Evan Gough

Webb Directly Images a Jupiter-Like Planet

The gas-giant exoplanet Epsilon Indi Ab imaged using the MIRI instrument on NASA’s Webb telescope. A star symbol marks the location of the host star, whose light has been blocked by MIRI’s coronagraph, resulting in the dark circle with a dashed white line. The planet is to the left of the star. Credit: NASA, ESA, CSA, STScI, E. Matthews (Max Planck Institute for Astronomy)

The JWST has directly imaged its first exoplanet, a temperate super Jupiter only about 12 light-years away from Earth. It could be the oldest and coldest planet ever detected.

July 2, 2024July 2, 2024 by Evan Gough

Alpha Centauri Could Have a Super Jupiter in Orbit

This image of the sky around the bright star Alpha Centauri AB also shows the much fainter red dwarf star, Proxima Centauri, the closest star to the Solar System. The picture was created from pictures forming part of the Digitized Sky Survey 2. The blue halo around Alpha Centauri AB is an artifact of the photographic process, the star is really pale yellow in colour like the Sun. Image Credit: Digitized Sky Survey 2 Acknowledgement: Davide De Martin/Mahdi Zamani

The three-body problem is one of Nature’s thorniest problems. The gravitational interactions and resulting movements of three bodies are notoriously difficult to predict because of instability. A planet orbiting two stars is an example of the three-body problem, but it’s sometimes called a “restricted three-body problem.” In that case, there are some potential stable orbits for a planet.

A new study shows that the nearby Alpha Centauri AB pair could host a Super Jupiter in a stable orbit.