PEPE
Published · Updated 3 hours ago · 4:18 p.m. UTC
Catalog designation TOI-7421 b · Discovery announced today
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64 light-yearsfrom Earth
PEPE
A giant planet composed mainly of gas
PEPE (catalog designation TOI-7421 b) is a gas giant exoplanet that orbits an A-type star. Its mass is 2.4 Jupiters, it takes 91 years to complete one orbit of its star, and is 26 AU from its star. Its discovery was announced today, September 3, 2026.
- Planet Radius:
- 1.26 x Jupiter
- Planet Type:
- Gas Giant
- Discovery Method:
- Imaging
- Planet Mass:
- 2.4 Jupiters
- Discovery Date:
- Sep 3, 2026
- Orbital Radius:
- 26 AU
- Orbital Period:
- 91 years
- Eccentricity:
- < 0.44
Name origin
The common name PEPE honors Francesco Pepe, the University of Geneva astronomer whose work on high-precision radial-velocity spectrographs helped make the modern exoplanet census possible. Pepe was a leader on HARPS and principal investigator of ESPRESSO, the Echelle SPectrograph for Rocky Exoplanets and Stable Spectroscopic Observations at ESO’s Very Large Telescope — instruments that set the standard for measuring the tiny stellar wobbles of distant worlds.
The official catalog designation is TOI-7421 b. PEPE — TOI-7421 b was announced today, September 3, 2026, as a newly imaged companion around an A-type host. The name is a recognition of Pepe’s decades of groundbreaking contributions to exoplanet detection, not a change to the TOI catalog identifier used in the archive.
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