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By European Space Agency
An international team of astronomers using the NASA/ESA/CSA James Webb Space Telescope have directly imaged an exoplanet roughly 12 light-years from Earth. While there were hints that the planet existed, it had not been confirmed until Webb imaged it. The planet is one of the coldest exoplanets observed to date.
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By NASA
6 Min Read NASA’s Webb Images Cold Exoplanet 12 Light-Years Away
This image of the gas-giant exoplanet Epsilon Indi Ab was taken with the coronagraph on NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope’s MIRI (Mid-Infrared Instrument). A star symbol marks the location of the host star Epsilon Indi A, whose light has been blocked by the coronagraph, resulting in the dark circle marked with a dashed white line (full image below) An international team of astronomers using NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope has directly imaged an exoplanet roughly 12 light-years from Earth. The planet, Epsilon Indi Ab, is one of the coldest exoplanets observed to date.
The planet is several times the mass of Jupiter and orbits the K-type star Epsilon Indi A (Eps Ind A), which is around the age of our Sun, but slightly cooler. The team observed Epsilon Indi Ab using the coronagraph on Webb’s MIRI (Mid-Infrared Instrument). Only a few tens of exoplanets have been directly imaged previously by space- and ground-based observatories.
Image A: Exoplanet Epsilon Indi Ab
This image of the gas-giant exoplanet Epsilon Indi Ab was taken with the coronagraph on NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope’s MIRI (Mid-Infrared Instrument). A star symbol marks the location of the host star Epsilon Indi A, whose light has been blocked by the coronagraph, resulting in the dark circle marked with a dashed white line. Epsilon Indi Ab is one of the coldest exoplanets ever directly imaged. Light at 10.6 microns was assigned the color blue, while light at 15.5 microns was assigned the color orange. MIRI did not resolve the planet, which is a point source. “Our prior observations of this system have been more indirect measurements of the star, which actually allowed us to see ahead of time that there was likely a giant planet in this system tugging on the star,” said team member Caroline Morley of the University of Texas at Austin. “That’s why our team chose this system to observe first with Webb.”
“This discovery is exciting because the planet is quite similar to Jupiter — it is a little warmer and is more massive, but is more similar to Jupiter than any other planet that has been imaged so far,” added lead author Elisabeth Matthews of the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy in Germany.
Previously imaged exoplanets tend to be the youngest, hottest exoplanets that are still radiating much of the energy from when they first formed. As planets cool and contract over their lifetime, they become significantly fainter and therefore harder to image.
A Solar System Analog
“Cold planets are very faint, and most of their emission is in the mid-infrared,” explained Matthews. “Webb is ideally suited to conduct mid-infrared imaging, which is extremely hard to do from the ground. We also needed good spatial resolution to separate the planet and the star in our images, and the large Webb mirror is extremely helpful in this aspect.”
Epsilon Indi Ab is one of the coldest exoplanets to be directly detected, with an estimated temperature of 35 degrees Fahrenheit (2 degrees Celsius) — colder than any other imaged planet beyond our solar system, and colder than all but one free-floating brown dwarf. The planet is only around 180 degrees Fahrenheit (100 degrees Celsius) warmer than gas giants in our solar system. This provides a rare opportunity for astronomers to study the atmospheric composition of true solar system analogs.
“Astronomers have been imagining planets in this system for decades; fictional planets orbiting Epsilon Indi have been the sites of Star Trek episodes, novels, and video games like Halo,” added Morley. “It’s exciting to actually see a planet there ourselves, and begin to measure its properties.”
Not Quite As Predicted
Epsilon Indi Ab is the twelfth closest exoplanet to Earth known to date and the closest planet more massive than Jupiter. The science team chose to study Eps Ind A because the system showed hints of a possible planetary body using a technique called radial velocity, which measures the back-and-forth wobbles of the host star along our line of sight.
“While we expected to image a planet in this system, because there were radial velocity indications of its presence, the planet we found isn’t what we had predicted,” shared Matthews. “It’s about twice as massive, a little farther from its star, and has a different orbit than we expected. The cause of this discrepancy remains an open question. The atmosphere of the planet also appears to be a little different than the model predictions. So far we only have a few photometric measurements of the atmosphere, meaning that it is hard to draw conclusions, but the planet is fainter than expected at shorter wavelengths.”
The team believes this may mean there is significant methane, carbon monoxide, and carbon dioxide in the planet’s atmosphere that are absorbing the shorter wavelengths of light. It might also suggest a very cloudy atmosphere.
The direct imaging of exoplanets is particularly valuable for characterization. Scientists can directly collect light from the observed planet and compare its brightness at different wavelengths. So far, the science team has only detected Epsilon Indi Ab at a few wavelengths, but they hope to revisit the planet with Webb to conduct both photometric and spectroscopic observations in the future. They also hope to detect other similar planets with Webb to find possible trends about their atmospheres and how these objects form.
NASA’s upcoming Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope will use a coronagraph to demonstrate direct imaging technology by photographing Jupiter-like worlds orbiting Sun-like stars – something that has never been done before. These results will pave the way for future missions to study worlds that are even more Earth-like.
These results were taken with Webb’s Cycle 1 General Observer program 2243 and have been published in the journal Nature.
The James Webb Space Telescope is the world’s premier space science observatory. Webb is solving mysteries in our solar system, looking beyond to distant worlds around other stars, and probing the mysterious structures and origins of our universe and our place in it. Webb is an international program led by NASA with its partners, ESA (European Space Agency) and CSA (Canadian Space Agency).
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Media Contacts
Laura Betz – laura.e.betz@nasa.gov, Rob Gutro – rob.gutro@nasa.gov
NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Md.
Christine Pulliam – cpulliam@stsci.edu , Hannah Braun hbraun@stsci.edu
Space Telescope Science Institute, Baltimore, Md.
Related Information
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Last Updated Jul 23, 2024 EditorStephen SabiaContactLaura Betzlaura.e.betz@nasa.gov Related Terms
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By NASA
5 Min Read Watch Carbon Dioxide Move Through Earth’s Atmosphere
Global CO2 ppm for January-March of 2020. This camera move orbits Earth from a distance. Credits:
NASA’s Scientific Visualization Studio Earth (ESD) Earth Home Explore Climate Change Science in Action Multimedia Data For Researchers What we’re looking at:
This global map shows concentrations of carbon dioxide as the gas moved through Earth’s atmosphere from January through March 2020, driven by wind patterns and atmospheric circulation.
Because of the model’s high resolution, you can zoom in and see carbon dioxide emissions rising from power plants, fires, and cities, then spreading across continents and oceans.
Global CO2 ppm for January-March of 2020. This camera move orbits Earth from a distance. Download this visualization from NASA’s Scientific Visualization Studio: https://svs.gsfc.nasa.gov/5196 Credits: NASA’s Scientific Visualization Studio “As policymakers and as scientists, we’re trying to account for where carbon comes from and how that impacts the planet,” said climate scientist Lesley Ott at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland. “You see here how everything is interconnected by these different weather patterns.”
You see here how everything is interconnected by these different weather patterns.
Lesley Ott
NASA Climate scientist
What are the sources of CO2?
Over China, the United States, and South Asia, the majority of emissions came from power plants, industrial facilities, and cars and trucks, Ott said. Meanwhile, in Africa and South America, emissions largely stemmed from fires, especially those related to land management, controlled agricultural burns and deforestation, along with the burning of oil and coal. Fires release carbon dioxide as they burn.
Why does the map look like it’s pulsing?
Global CO2 ppm for January-March of 2020. This camera move zooms in on the eastern United States. Download this visualization from NASA’s Scientific Visualization Studio: https://svs.gsfc.nasa.gov/5196 Credits: NASA’s Scientific Visualization Studio There are two primary reasons for the pulsing: First, fires have a clear day-night cycle. They typically flare up during the day and die down at night.
Second, you’re seeing the absorption and release of carbon dioxide as trees and plants photosynthesize. Earth’s land and oceans absorb about 50% of carbon dioxide; these are natural carbon sinks. Plants take up carbon dioxide during the day as they photosynthesize and then release it at night through respiration. Notice that much of the pulsing occurred in regions with lots of trees, like mid- or high-latitude forests. And because the data were taken during the Southern Hemisphere summer, you see more pulsing in the tropics and South America, where it was the active growing season.
Some of the pulsing also comes from the planetary boundary layer — the lowest 3,000 feet (900 meters) of the atmosphere — which rises as the Earth’s surface is heated by sunlight during the day, then falls as it cools at night.
The data that drives it:
The map was created by NASA’s Scientific Visualization Studio using a model called GEOS, short for the Goddard Earth Observing System. GEOS is a high-resolution weather model, powered by supercomputers, that is used to simulate what was happening in the atmosphere — including storm systems, cloud formations, and other natural events. GEOS pulls in billions of data points from ground observations and satellite instruments, such as the Terra satellite’s MODIS and the Suomi-NPP satellite’s VIIRS instruments. Its resolution is more than 100 times greater than a typical weather model.
Ott and other climate scientists wanted to know what GEOS would show if it was used to model the movement and density of carbon dioxide in the global atmosphere.
“We had this opportunity to say: can we tag along and see what really high-resolution CO2 looks like?” Ott said. “We had a feeling we were going to see plume structures and things that we’ve never been able to see when we do these coarser resolution simulations.”
Her instinct was right. “Just seeing how persistent the plumes were and the interaction of the plumes with weather systems, it was tremendous.”
Why it matters:
NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center/Scientific Visualization Studio/ Katie Jepson We can’t tackle climate change without confronting the fact that we’re emitting massive amounts of CO2, and it’s warming the atmosphere, Ott said.
Carbon dioxide is a heat-trapping greenhouse gas and the primary reason for Earth’s rising temperatures. As CO2 builds in the atmosphere, it warms our planet. This is clear in the numbers. 2023 was the hottest year on record, according to scientists from NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS) in New York. Most of the 10 hottest years on record have occurred in the past decade.
All this carbon dioxide isn’t harmful to air quality. In fact, we need some carbon dioxide to keep the planet warm enough for life to exist. But when too much CO2 is pumped into the atmosphere, the Earth warms too much and too fast. That’s what has been happening for at least the past half century. The concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere increased from approximately 278 parts per million in 1750, the beginning of the industrial era, to 427 parts per million in May 2024.
Read More: Emissions from Fossil Fuels Continue to Rise
Human activities have “unequivocally caused warming,” according to the latest report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. This warming is leading to all sorts of changes to our climate, including more intense storms, wildfires, heat waves, and rising sea levels.
Inside the SVS studio:
Carbon dioxide exists everywhere in the atmosphere, and the challenge for AJ Christensen, a senior visualization designer at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, was to show the differences in density of this invisible gas.
“We didn’t want people to get the impression that there was no carbon dioxide in these sparser regions,” Christensen said. “But we also wanted to really highlight the dense regions because that’s the interesting feature of the data. We were trying to show that there’s a lot of density over New York and Beijing.”
Data visualizations help people understand how Earth’s systems work, and they can help scientists find patterns in massive datasets, Ott said.
“What’s happening is you’re stitching together this very complex array of models to make use of the different satellite data, and that’s helping us fill in this broad puzzle of all the processes that control carbon dioxide,” Ott said. “The hope is that if we understand greenhouse gases really well today, we’ll be able to build models that better predict them over the next decades or even centuries.”
For more information and data on greenhouse gases, visit the U.S. Greenhouse Gas Center.
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Jenny Marder
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Last Updated Jul 23, 2024 Location Goddard Space Flight Center Related Terms
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By NASA
A timelapse of the Twin Rockets to Investigate Cusp Electrodynamics (TRICE-2) mission launching from Andøya Space Center in Andenes, Norway on Dec. 8, 2018. NASA/Jamie Adkins When it comes to discoveries about our upper atmosphere, it pays to know your surroundings.
Using data from the Twin Rockets to Investigate Cusp Electrodynamics (TRICE-2) rocket launch, NASA scientist Francesca Di Mare and Gregory Howes from the University of Iowa studied waves traveling down Earth’s magnetic field lines into the polar atmosphere. These waves were known to accelerate electrons, which pick up speed as they “surf” along the electric field of the wave. But their effect on ions — a more heterogenous group of positively charged particles, which exist alongside electrons — was unknown.
By estimating the ion mixture they were flying through — predominantly protons and singly-charged oxygen ions — the scientists discovered that these waves were accelerating protons as they circle about the Earth’s magnetic field lines as well as electrons as they surf the waves. The findings reveal a new way our upper atmosphere is energized.
Read more about the new results in Physical Review Letters.
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By NASA
6 min read
Preparations for Next Moonwalk Simulations Underway (and Underwater)
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In this time-lapse video of a test conducted at JPL in June 2023, an engineering model of the Planetary Instrument for X-ray Lithochemistry (PIXL) instrument aboard NASA’s Perseverance Mars rover places itself against a rock to collect data. NASA/JPL-Caltech Artificial intelligence is helping scientists to identify minerals within rocks studied by the Perseverance rover.
Some scientists dream of exploring planets with “smart” spacecraft that know exactly what data to look for, where to find it, and how to analyze it. Although making that dream a reality will take time, advances made with NASA’s Perseverance Mars rover offer promising steps in that direction.
For almost three years, the rover mission has been testing a form of artificial intelligence that seeks out minerals in the Red Planet’s rocks. This marks the first time AI has been used on Mars to make autonomous decisions based on real-time analysis of rock composition.
PIXL, the white instrument at top left, is one of several science tools located on the end of the robotic arm aboard NASA’s Perseverance rover. The Mars rover’s left navcam took the images that make up this composite on March 2, 2021NASA/JPL-Caltech The software supports PIXL (Planetary Instrument for X-ray Lithochemistry), a spectrometer developed by NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California. By mapping the chemical composition of minerals across a rock’s surface, PIXL allows scientists to determine whether the rock formed in conditions that could have been supportive of microbial life in Mars’ ancient past.
Called “adaptive sampling,” the software autonomously positions the instrument close to a rock target, then looks at PIXL’s scans of the target to find minerals worth examining more deeply. It’s all done in real time, without the rover talking to mission controllers back on Earth.
“We use PIXL’s AI to home in on key science,” said the instrument’s principal investigator, Abigail Allwood of JPL. “Without it, you’d see a hint of something interesting in the data and then need to rescan the rock to study it more. This lets PIXL reach a conclusion without humans examining the data.”
This image of a rock target nicknamed “Thunderbolt Peak” was created by NASA’s Perseverance Mars rover using PIXL, which determines the mineral composition of rocks by zapping them with X-rays. Each blue dot in the image represents a spot where an X-ray hit.NASA/JPL-Caltech/DTU/QUT Data from Perseverance’s instruments, including PIXL, helps scientists determine when to drill a core of rock and seal it in a titanium metal tube so that it, along with other high-priority samples, could be brought to Earth for further study as part of NASA’s Mars Sample Return campaign.
Adaptive sampling is not the only application of AI on Mars. About 2,300 miles (3,700 kilometers) from Perseverance is NASA’s Curiosity, which pioneered a form of AI that allows the rover to autonomously zap rocks with a laser based on their shape and color. Studying the gas that burns off after each laser zap reveals a rock’s chemical composition. Perseverance features this same ability, as well as a more advanced form of AI that enables it to navigate without specific direction from Earth. Both rovers still rely on dozens of engineers and scientists to plan each day’s set of hundreds of individual commands, but these digital smarts help both missions get more done in less time.
“The idea behind PIXL’s adaptive sampling is to help scientists find the needle within a haystack of data, freeing up time and energy for them to focus on other things,” said Peter Lawson, who led the implementation of adaptive sampling before retiring from JPL. “Ultimately, it helps us gather the best science more quickly.”
Using AI to Position PIXL
AI assists PIXL in two ways. First, it positions the instrument just right once the instrument is in the vicinity of a rock target. Located at the end of Perseverance’s robotic arm, the spectrometer sits on six tiny robotic legs, called a hexapod. PIXL’s camera repeatedly checks the distance between the instrument and a rock target to aid with positioning.
Temperature swings on Mars are large enough that Perseverance’s arm will expand or contract a microscopic amount, which can throw off PIXL’s aim. The hexapod automatically adjusts the instrument to get it exceptionally close without coming into contact with the rock.
“We have to make adjustments on the scale of micrometers to get the accuracy we need,” Allwood said. “It gets close enough to the rock to raise the hairs on the back of an engineer’s neck.”
Making a Mineral Map
Once PIXL is in position, another AI system gets the chance to shine. PIXL scans a postage-stamp-size area of a rock, firing an X-ray beam thousands of times to create a grid of microscopic dots. Each dot reveals information about the chemical composition of the minerals present.
Minerals are crucial to answering key questions about Mars. Depending on the rock, scientists might be on the hunt for carbonates, which hide clues to how water may have formed the rock, or they may be looking for phosphates, which could have provided nutrients for microbes, if any were present in the Martian past.
There’s no way for scientists to know ahead of time which of the hundreds of X-ray zaps will turn up a particular mineral, but when the instrument finds certain minerals, it can automatically stop to gather more data — an action called a “long dwell.” As the system improves through machine learning, the list of minerals on which PIXL can focus with a long dwell is growing.
“PIXL is kind of a Swiss army knife in that it can be configured depending on what the scientists are looking for at a given time,” said JPL’s David Thompson, who helped develop the software. “Mars is a great place to test out AI since we have regular communications each day, giving us a chance to make tweaks along the way.”
When future missions travel deeper into the solar system, they’ll be out of contact longer than missions currently are on Mars. That’s why there is strong interest in developing more autonomy for missions as they rove and conduct science for the benefit of humanity.
More About the Mission
A key objective for Perseverance’s mission on Mars is astrobiology, including the search for signs of ancient microbial life. The rover will characterize the planet’s geology and past climate, pave the way for human exploration of the Red Planet, and be the first mission to collect and cache Martian rock and regolith (broken rock and dust).
Subsequent NASA missions, in cooperation with ESA (European Space Agency), would send spacecraft to Mars to collect these sealed samples from the surface and return them to Earth for in-depth analysis.
The Mars 2020 Perseverance mission is part of NASA’s Moon to Mars exploration approach, which includes Artemis missions to the Moon that will help prepare for human exploration of the Red Planet.
JPL, which is managed for NASA by Caltech in Pasadena, California, built and manages operations of the Perseverance rover.
For more about Perseverance:
mars.nasa.gov/mars2020/
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Andrew Good
Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif.
818-393-2433
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Karen Fox / Alana Johnson
NASA Headquarters, Washington
202-358-1600 / 202-358-1501
karen.c.fox@nasa.gov / alana.r.johnson@nasa.gov
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Last Updated Jul 16, 2024 Related Terms
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