We have a new entry to our BABIES award list: the COol Companions ON Ultrawide orbiTS or COCONUTS survey out of the University of Hawai’i. That’s just fantastic really.

And the reason they made it on our radar is that graduate student Zhoujian Zhang has directly imaged an exoplanet, and it’s the closest one to Earth ever directly imaged at a mere 35 light-years away. 

The star is called COCONUTS-2, which makes the planet COCONUTS-2b. The star is a low-mass red dwarf, and the planet is a gas giant about six times more massive than Jupiter. The discovery has been published in The Astrophysical Journal Letters and includes that direct image. Now, the planet is a tiny red dot, but that’s okay. It’s there. And as Zhang explains: With a massive planet on a super-wide-separation orbit, and with a very cool central star, COCONUTS-2 represents a very different planetary system than our own solar system. 

It’s also the second-coldest planet ever imaged, coming in it at about 175 degrees Celsius. You could not bake cookies on the surface of this planet. Initially discovered in 2011, COCONUTS-2b was thought to be a rogue planet, but now it has a home. We’re excited for Zhang as this work is part of his now-finished doctoral thesis, so congratulations! You’ll be able to take a closer look at Zhang’s image at our website DailySpace.org.

More Information

University of Hawai’i press release

“The Second Discovery from the COol Companions ON Ultrawide orbiTS (COCONUTS) Program: A Cold Wide-Orbit Exoplanet around a Young Field M Dwarf at 10.9 pc,” Zhoujian Zhang et al., 2021 July 28, The Astrophysical Journal Letters (preprint on arxiv.org)