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Epic exoplanet 51 EP

Wendelstein-2 b

RA 297.7909° · Dec 16.9126° · exoplanet

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Score breakdown

· 5 badges
51 pts · Epic
Epic 78 pts → Anomaly
  • Ultra-hot Jupiter +26
  • Tidally locked +10
  • Distant (over 1,000 light-years) +6
  • Confirmed exoplanet +5
  • Gas giant +4
Total score 51

27 more points to reach Anomaly.

Badges

  • Confirmed exoplanet · +5
  • Distant (over 1,000 light-years) · +6
  • Gas giant · +4
  • Ultra-hot Jupiter · +26
  • Tidally locked · +10

Trivia

What makes it special

  • Ultra-hot Jupiter. So hot that iron vaporises on the dayside, blows around to the night side and rains back down as molten metal.

Hard to believe

  • It would float. It is less dense than water. Drop it in a big enough ocean and the whole world would bob on the surface.

What it actually is

  • Hugging its star. It orbits closer to its star than Mercury does to the Sun, completing a lap in less time than Mercury takes.
  • What it is made of. Lighter than Neptune — a puffed-up ball of hydrogen and helium with no surface anywhere on it to stand on.

Sense of scale

  • In perspective. Far away by human standards, yet still a local address inside the Milky Way's spiral arms.

Find it in the sky

  • How to spot it. At magnitude 16.2 it is far too faint for the eye: this one belongs to cameras and long exposures.
  • Northern sky. It rides the northern half of the sky — an easier target the further north you are.
  • Best time of year. It stands highest in the middle of the night around July — that's when to go looking.

Properties

density gcc
0.62
diameter km
165747.3377
discovery facility
Haleakala Observatory
discovery method
Transit
discovery year
2020
dist ly
1844.5459
eccentricity
0.057
eq temp k
2470
host star teff
4591
inclination
87.87
insolation
282.3101
mag
16.186
mass earth
232.3337
name
Wendelstein-2 b
orbital period days
1.7522
radius earth
12.9935
semi major au
0.0234
spect
K6 V
sys num planets
1
sys num stars
1
tidally locked
yes
tidally locked inferred
yes

Nearby objects

About Wendelstein-2 b

Wendelstein-2 b is an epic exoplanet. It lies about 1,844.5 light-years from Earth, shines at apparent magnitude 16.19, has spectral type K6 V and has an equilibrium temperature near 2,470 K.

So hot that iron vaporises on the dayside, blows around to the night side and rains back down as molten metal.

How to see it

At apparent magnitude 16.19, it takes a larger telescope or a long-exposure image to capture.

Like any astronomical target, Wendelstein-2 b is best seen from a dark site away from city lights, and when it is above the horizon depends on your latitude and the time of year. The visibility panel above works out tonight's viewing window for your saved location.

Why Wendelstein-2 b is an epic exoplanet

Wendelstein-2 b scores 51 points on Spacedle's rarity scale, which places it in the epic tier. Another 27 points would lift it into a rarer tier.

That score comes from 5 science badges — Confirmed exoplanet, Distant (over 1,000 light-years), Gas giant, Ultra-hot Jupiter and Tidally locked — each earned for a real, measurable property of the object. Rarity on Spacedle is never random: the more remarkable an object's astrophysics, the more badges it collects, the higher it scores, and the rarer it ranks.