Tomasz Nowakowski is a writer for the website Phys.org.
The light curve of OGLE-2014-BLG-0319 is from the OGLE data. The best-fit single-lens model has gray dashed lines in panels. A blue panel shows a zoom-in view of the area surrounding a blue chain line. The credit was given to Miyazaki et al.
An international team of astronomer reported the detection of a new sub-Jupiter-mass alien world around an M-dwarf star. The newly discovered exoplanet, OGLE-2014-BLG-0319Lb, is about half the size of Jupiter. The discovery was detailed in a paper published on December 30.
The microlensing method is used to detect planetary and stellar-mass objects regardless of the light they emit. Astronomers can study objects that emit little or no light if they are sensitive to the mass of the objects.
The OGLE collaboration announced the discovery of the microlensing event OGLE-2014-BLG-0319 on March 21st. The event was also detected by the Microlensing Observations in Astrophysics team.
Shota Miyazaki of Osaka University in Japan leads a group of astronomy experts who analyzed the microlensing event and found a signal indicating the presence of a planetary object. Microlensing events manifest as short-lived anomalies from typical single-lens light curves. Sometimes, a degeneracy problem can be caused by deviations where several model interpretations are possible.
The researchers wrote that they analyzed a microlensing event OGLE-2014-BLG-0319 that presented three planetary interpretations of different mass ratios.
The team found that the planet has a mass of about 0.49 Jupiter mass and is travelling at a rate of 3.49AU per hour. The parent star is most likely an M dwarf. The system is 25200 light years away from the Earth.
Future follow-up observations with high-angular resolution might be able to shed more light on the properties of the newfound extrasolar world. Several more years might be needed to resolve the lens position and detect the lens flux, according to the researchers.
The authors of the paper said that their study showed the problem of detecting new exoplanets by investigating microlensing events. They concluded that this problem would be more common for short timescale events and that it would have a large impact on the estimation for the number of planets.
This method is not likely to be successful in shorter timescale events due to low-mass objects. Careful treatment is needed for estimating the mass ratio function of the companions around the low-mass hosts which only the microlensing can probe.
OGLE-2014-BLG-0319 is a sub-Jupiter-Mass Planetary event with different mass ratios and relative proper motions.
The Science X Network will be launched in 2022.
A new sub-Jupiter-mass exoplanet was detected by the astronomer on January 10, 2022.
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