Epsilon Indi A b is a giant planet that has been photographed, not just inferred. In 2024 the James Webb Space Telescope captured an image of it next to its star, Epsilon Indi A, about 12 light-years away. It is one of the coldest planets ever imaged, at about 275 kelvin, close to the freezing point of water, and its star is about the age of the Sun. Almost every other directly imaged planet is a young, hot one that still glows from its formation, so a cold, old giant like this is rare.
Astronomers suspected it long before they saw it. A slow drift in the star's motion, measured over years by the radial velocity method, and a slight shift in its position in the sky both pointed to a large companion. In 2018 a team led by Fabo Feng described it as a cold Jupiter with a minimum mass of about 2.7 Jupiter masses on an orbit of roughly 53 years. When a team led by Elisabeth Matthews imaged it with Webb's MIRI instrument, the planet matched the drift but not those predicted properties: it was about twice as massive and on a different orbit. A 2026 follow-up by the same team refitted its orbit and put its mass at about 7.6 Jupiter masses.
Webb has also begun to read its atmosphere. The planet is fainter than expected at shorter infrared wavelengths. The 2026 imaging confirmed ammonia, but less than models predict, and the team's preferred explanation is thick clouds of water ice. A separate 2026 study with Webb's spectrographs detected ammonia and water, with a weaker signal of methane. The system has two more members: a pair of brown dwarfs, objects between planets and stars in mass, orbiting far from Epsilon Indi A.