Kepler telescope delivers new planetary discovery from the grave

The Jodrell Bank Centre for Astrophysics is located.

An international team of astrophysicists led by the Jodrell Bank Center for Astrophysics has presented an amazing new discovery of a twin Jupiter and a star at a distance of 17,000 light years from Earth.

The exoplanet, K2-2016-BLG-0005Lb, is almost identical to Jupiter in terms of its mass and distance from the sun. The exoplanetary system is twice as far away as the previous one, which found over 2,700 confirmed planets.

The first planet to be discovered from space in this way was found using a prediction of Einstein's Theory of Relativity. The study was submitted to the journal Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society and has been made available as a preprint on ArXiv.org.

David Specht is a PhD student at The University of Manchester. The team used the microlensing effect to find an exoplanet using the data collected from millions of stars. The aim was to look for evidence of an exoplanet and its host star temporarily bending and magnifying the light from a background star as it passes by the line of sight.

To see the effect at all requires almost perfect alignment between the foreground planetary system and a background star, according to Dr. Eamonn Kerins, Principal Investigator for the Science and Technology Facilities Council grant that funded the work. The chance that a background star is affected by a planet is hundreds of millions to one against. There are hundreds of millions of stars in the center of our universe. So he sat and watched them for three months.

A new search algorithm was presented by Dr. Iain McDonald and Dr. Kerins at the time an STFC-funded researcher. There were five new candidate microlensing signals that were uncovered in the analysis and one showed clear indications of an anomalies.

The same area of sky was looked at by five international ground-based surveys. At a distance of around 135 million km from Earth, the teams observing from Earth were able to see the anomalies slightly earlier. The new study shows that the signal is caused by a distant exoplanet.

The difference in vantage point between the two allowed us to triangulate where the planetary system is located.

pler was able to observe without interruption by the weather or daylight, allowing us to determine the mass of the exoplanet and its host star. It is basically Jupiter's identical twin in terms of its mass and position from its Sun, which is about 60 percent of the mass of our own Sun.

The Nancy Grace Roman Space telescope will be launched by NASA. Roman will use the microlensing method to find planets. A microlensing exoplanet search is one of the science activities that could be undertaken by the European Space Agency's Euclid mission.

Dr. Kerins is the deputy lead for the eoplanet science working group. The other way around, Roman and Euclid will be better for this kind of work. He said that they will be able to complete the planet census.

We will learn how typical the architecture of our own solar system is. We can use the data to test our ideas of how planets form. This is the beginning of a new chapter in our search for other worlds.

More information: D. Specht et al, Kepler K2 Campaign 9: II. First space-based discovery of an exoplanet using microlensing. arXiv:2203.16959v1 [astro-ph.EP], arxiv.org/abs/2203.16959 Journal information: Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society Provided by Jodrell Bank Centre for Astrophysics Citation: Kepler telescope delivers new planetary discovery from the grave (2022, April 1) retrieved 1 April 2022 from https://phys.org/news/2022-04-kepler-telescope-planetary-discovery-grave.html This document is subject to copyright. Apart from any fair dealing for the purpose of private study or research, no part may be reproduced without the written permission. The content is provided for information purposes only.