NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope has taken a rare image of a freezing cold planet that orbits a star 60 light-years from Earth.
This discovery is helping scientists better understand how strange and chaotic some planetary systems can be — and how different they are from our own solar system.
The planet, called 14 Herculis c, orbits a star named 14 Herculis in the Milky Way galaxy. What makes this discovery special is not just the image itself, but how cold this planet is.
Most of the nearly 6,000 known exoplanets (planets beyond our solar system) have been discovered using indirect methods, and very few have been directly imaged.
Of those, most are very hot. But this planet is one of the coldest ever photographed — with temperatures around 26 degrees Fahrenheit (minus 3 degrees Celsius). That’s colder than any exoplanet we’ve seen clearly before.
Researchers used Webb’s powerful Near-Infrared Camera (NIRCam) to capture the image. Its sensitivity to infrared light makes it possible to spot such cold and distant objects.
William Balmer, a graduate student at Johns Hopkins University and co-lead author of the study, explained that this kind of observation opens the door to studying older and colder exoplanets, something that wasn’t possible before Webb.
14 Herculis is similar to our sun in both age and temperature, though it’s slightly smaller and cooler. It has two known planets, and this new image is of the outer one, 14 Herculis c. The inner planet, 14 Herculis b, was hidden by a mask used in the imaging process.
What’s unusual is that the two planets orbit in completely different planes — not in the same flat disk like the planets in our solar system. Instead, their orbits cross each other at a sharp angle, around 40 degrees, making the system look like a big “X” with the star in the center.
This is the first time a planet in such a misaligned system has been directly imaged.
Scientists think the strange tilt of the planets might be due to a dramatic event in the past, such as a third planet being violently ejected from the system.
This would have disrupted the orbits of the remaining planets, leaving behind the chaotic system we see today. Balmer noted that even our solar system had its own dramatic early days, and big planets like Jupiter played a huge role in shaping the orbits of other bodies.
Webb also revealed more details about 14 Herculis c’s orbit and atmosphere. The planet is about 1.4 billion miles from its star, on a stretched-out, oval-shaped orbit. That’s about 15 times farther than Earth is from the sun. This cold planet is about seven times more massive than Jupiter.
What surprised researchers was how dim the planet looked at a specific wavelength of infrared light.
Based on its age and mass, it should be brighter. The best explanation is something called carbon disequilibrium chemistry, which is also seen in very cold brown dwarfs. This means gases like carbon dioxide and carbon monoxide are showing up where we’d normally expect methane.
That happens because the atmosphere is churning, carrying warmer gases from deep inside up to the cooler outer layers.
This new image is just the beginning. Scientists plan to study the planet’s atmosphere more deeply using spectroscopy, which could reveal even more about its chemical makeup and the system’s strange history. With Webb’s help, we may soon uncover more secrets hidden in cold, chaotic planetary systems like this one.
