Meet Coconuts-2b, an exoplanet with six times the mass of Jupiter🥥🌌

There’s a good explanation for the planet’s unusual name.
The next time you look up into the night sky and marvel at the stars and vastness of space, remember there’s a planet out there named Coconuts-2b. Even better, this is a pretty cool, pretty big exoplanet that could tell us more about the history of gas giants like our own Jupiter and Saturn.
“A University of Hawaii Institute for Astronomy graduate student has beaten the odds and discovered a directly imaged exoplanet, and it’s the closest one to Earth ever found, at a distance of only 35 light-years,” the university said in a statement on Tuesday. Zhoujian Zhang is lead author of a study on the planet.
Researchers have spotted over 4,000 exoplanets, and many have been located by looking for a telltale dip in brightness as a planet moves in front of its star. Coconuts-2b’s discovery is different. “The planet can be directly imaged thanks to emitted light produced by residual heat trapped since the planet’s formation,” the university said. It can be seen in infrared by a sensitive telescope.
The gas giant is truly gigantic with six times the mass of Jupiter. It’s named for the Cool Companions on Ultrawide Orbits (Coconuts) survey. The survey is seeking out exoplanets (planets located outside of our solar system) that are orbiting pretty far from their host stars. The planet is named Coconuts-2b and its star system is Coconuts-2. The survey had previous turned up a star system called Coconuts-1.
The planet was first spotted back in 2011, but researchers thought it was all on its own with no host star. The new study published in Astrophysical Journal Letters this week found the planet is actually orbiting its star at a distance 6,000 times that of the Earth orbiting the sun.
The views on Coconuts-2b would be pretty radical compared to what we’re used to on Earth. “Nighttime and daytime would look basically the same, with the host star appearing as a bright red star in the dark sky,” the university said.
Studying exoplanets can help us learn about the history of our own solar system. “With its huge orbital separation,” said Zhang, “Coconuts-2b will be a great laboratory for studying the atmosphere and composition of a young gas-giant planet.”

In CNET

www.cnet.com/news/saturn-at-opposition-how-to-the-planet-line-up-with-earth/

Massive COCONUTS Exoplanet Discovery: Giant Planet Just 35 Light Years From Earth
Astronomers have discovered thousands of exoplanets — planets beyond our solar system — but few have been directly imaged, because they are extremely difficult to see with existing telescopes. A University of Hawaiʻi Institute for Astronomy (IfA) graduate student has beaten the odds and discovered a directly imaged exoplanet, and it’s the closest one to Earth ever found, at a distance of only 35 light years.
Using the COol Companions ON Ultrawide orbiTS (COCONUTS) survey, IfA graduate student Zhoujian Zhang and a team of astronomers, Michael Liu and Zach Claytor (IfA), William Best (University of Texas at Austin), Trent Dupuy (University of Edinburgh) and Robert Siverd (Gemini Observatory/National Optical-Infrared Astronomy Research Laboratory) identified a planet about six times the mass of Jupiter. The team’s research, published in The Astrophysical Journal Letters, led to the discovery of the low-temperature gas-giant planet orbiting a low-mass red dwarf star, about 6,000 times farther than the Earth orbits the Sun. They dubbed the new planetary system COCONUTS-2, and the new planet COCONUTS-2b.
“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,” Zhang explained. The COCONUTS survey has been the focus of his recently-completed PhD thesis, aiming to find wide-separation companions around stars of all different types close to Earth.
Trapped heat helps detect planet
COCONUTS-2b is the second-coldest imaged exoplanet found to date, with a temperature of just 320 degrees Fahrenheit, which is slightly cooler than most ovens use to bake cookies. The planet can be directly imaged thanks to emitted light produced by residual heat trapped since the planet’s formation. Still, the energy output of the planet is more than a million times weaker than the Sun’s, so the planet can only be detected using lower-energy infrared light.
“Directly detecting and studying the light from gas-giant planets around other stars is ordinarily very difficult, since the planets we find usually have small-separation orbits and thus are buried in the glare of their host star’s light,” said Liu, Zhang’s thesis advisor. “With its huge orbital separation, COCONUTS-2b will be a great laboratory for studying the atmosphere and composition of a young gas-giant planet.”
The planet was first detected in 2011 by the Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer satellite, but it was believed to be a free-floating object, not orbiting a star. Zhang and his collaborators discovered that it is in fact gravitationally bound to a low-mass star, COCONUTS-2A, which is about one-third the mass of the Sun, and about 10 times younger.
Darkness prevails
Due to its wide-separation orbit and cool host star, COCONUTS-2b’s skies would look dramatically different to an observer there compared to the skies on Earth. Nighttime and daytime would look basically the same, with the host star appearing as a bright red star in the dark sky.
Zhang’s discovery has fueled his desire to continue to explore exoplanets, brown dwarfs, and stars. The aspiring astronomer graduated from IfA this summer and will begin his postdoctoral research in fall 2021, with IfA alumnus Brendan Bowler, an astronomy professor at the University of Texas at Austin.

In SciTechDaily

Massive COCONUTS Exoplanet Discovery: Giant Planet Just 35 Light Years From Earth

Full Article “The Second Discovery from the COCONUTS Program: A Cold Wide-orbit Exoplanet around a Young Field M Dwarf at 10.9 pc” at https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.3847/2041-8213/ac1123

Abstract
We present the identification of the second discovery from the COol Companions ON Ultrawide orbiTS (COCONUTS) program, the COCONUTS-2 system, composed of the M3 dwarf L 34-26 and the T9 dwarf WISEPA J075108.79−763449.6. Given their common proper motions and parallaxes, these two field objects constitute a physically bound pair with a projected separation of 594” (6471au). The primary star COCONUTS-2A has strong stellar activity (Hα, X-ray, and ultraviolet emission) and is rapidly rotating (Prot = 2.83 days), from which we estimate an age of 150–800 Myr. Comparing equatorial rotational velocity derived from the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) light curve to spectroscopic vsini, we find that COCONUTS-2A has a nearly edge-on inclination. The wide exoplanet COCONUTS-2b has an effective temperature of Teff = 434 ± 9 K, a surface gravity of $\mathrm{log}g={4.11}{-0.18}^{+0.11}$ dex, and a mass of M = ${6.3}{-1.9}^{+1.5}$ MJup based on hot-start evolutionary models, leading to a mass ratio of ${0.016}{-0.005}^{+0.004}$ for the COCONUTS-2 system. COCONUTS-2b is the second coldest (after WD 0806−661B), and the second widest (after TYC 9486-927-1 b) exoplanet imaged to date. Comparison of COCONUTS-2b’s infrared photometry with ultracool model atmospheres suggests the presence of both condensate clouds and non-equilibrium chemistry in its photosphere. Similar to 51 Eri b, COCONUTS-2b has a sufficiently low luminosity ($\mathrm{log}({L}{\mathrm{bol}}/{L}_{\odot })=-6.384\pm 0.028$ dex) to be consistent with the cold-start process that may form gas-giant (exo)planets, though its large separation means that such formation would not have occurred in situ. Finally, at a distance of 10.9 pc, COCONUTS-2b is the nearest imaged exoplanet to Earth known to date.