Astronomers discover ‘Jupiter’s identical twin’ exoplanet

Data from the mission is still being used to make new discoveries even though the telescope was retired. An international team of astronomer used data from the mission to identify a new planet that is remarkably similar to Jupiter but is located almost 17,000 light-years away.

The planet, named K2-2016-BLG-0005Lb, was discovered by sifting through data from the previous year. It is almost the same mass as Jupiter, and it is far away from its star. The authors of the study write that it is a close Jupiter analogue.

Thanks to an alignment of a large-mass object between the planet and us, it was possible to see it, even though it was so far away. Astronomers can see distant objects with the intermediate objects acting as magnifying glasses using this technique.

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. There are hundreds of millions of stars in the center of our universe. So he sat and watched them for three months.

It is surprising that it was possible to find a planet using data from the Kepler telescope. The star's brightness is caused by a planet passing between us and the star. More than 2,600 exoplanets were discovered in this way.

Kerins compared the latest discovery to upcoming missions like NASA's Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope and the European Space Agency's Euclid space telescope. The other way around, Roman and Euclid will be better for this kind of work. They will be able to complete the planet census.

Further study of exoplanets is important to learn more about far-off systems and how planets here might have formed. Kerins says that with future exoplanet hunters, they 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.

The research can be found on a pre-print archive at arXiv.org.

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