NASA Just Found One of the Coldest Planets Ever – And It's in a Twisted Orbit

SciTechDaily ^ | June 16, 2025 | Space Telescope Science Institute

[SunkenCiv]

A distant star system that scientists described as abnormal, chaotic, and strange is finally coming into focus, thanks to NASA's James Webb Space Telescope. Using its powerful Near-Infrared Camera (NIRCam), Webb has captured a rare image of one of two known planets orbiting the star 14 Herculis, located about 60 light-years from Earth in the Milky Way.

The planet, known as 14 Herculis c, stands out for how incredibly cold it is. While astronomers have discovered nearly 6,000 exoplanets, only a small handful have been directly imaged, and most of those are extremely hot, with temperatures soaring into the hundreds or thousands of degrees. But Webb's data shows that 14 Herculis c, a massive planet about seven times the size of Jupiter, is chilling at just 26 degrees Fahrenheit, or minus 3 degrees Celsius...

"The colder an exoplanet, the harder it is to image, so this is a totally new regime of study that Webb has unlocked with its extreme sensitivity in the infrared," said William Balmer, co-first author of the new paper and graduate student at Johns Hopkins University. "We are now able to add to the catalog of not just hot, young exoplanets imaged, but older exoplanets that are far colder than we've directly seen before Webb."

[Lonesome in Massachussets]

So this means nothing to intellectually sterile humans

FIFY

[Lonesome in Massachussets]

It’s an interesting definition of “frigid”, minus three centigrade. Earth is only 15 C, on average, barely above that. Mars is -62 C.

[55Ford]

More ‘Fake News’ from NASA.