51 Eri b (NIRcam image)

The NASA/ESA/CSA James Webb Space Telescope’s NIRCam (Near-Infrared Camera) captured this image of Eridani 51 b, a cool, young exoplanet that orbits 17.7 billion kilometres from its star. Its distance is equivalent to a location between the orbits of Neptune and Saturn in our solar system. The observations detected the planet is rich in carbon dioxide, providing strong evidence that the planet formed much like Jupiter and Saturn, by slowly building a solid core that attracted gas from within a protoplanetary disk.

The 51 Eridani system is 96 light-years from Earth. This image includes filters representing 4.1-micron light as red.

[Image description: This image shows the exoplanet 51 Eri b. The image is mostly black, with very faint residual red dots apparent in the central region of the image. At the centre of the image, there is a symbol representing a star labeled 51 Eri. This star blocks the light from the host star. To the left of the circle is a fuzzy bright red circle, which is the exoplanet, labeled b.]