Fabo Feng

Jupiter is a colossal ball of gas that sits five times farther from the Sun than Earth. Now imagine a similar ball, but around another star, at a distance tens of times greater. These are called cold Jupiters, and they remain a puzzle: how did they get there? Astronomers studied four such planets around distant stars.

Around the star Epsilon Indi, visible to the naked eye from the Southern Hemisphere, orbits a planet the size of Jupiter. The temperature there is like a good freezer: minus 200 degrees Celsius. The James Webb Space Telescope has for the first time directly imaged it and measured the light the planet emits in the thermal range.