The now-retired Kepler Space Telescope has found an exoplanet, a planet that is 17,000 light-years from Earth.
It is the farthest world ever picked up by the planet-hunting observatory. The exoplanet is almost identical to Jupiter in mass and distance from the Sun.
The first exoplanet confirmed from a 2016 data run that detected 27 possible objects is named K2-2016-BLG-0005Lb. The discovery can be found on the preprint server arXiv.
astronomer Eamonn Kerins of the University of Manchester said that it is amazing that it has done so.
The field of exoplanet astronomy was blown wide open by the Kepler spacecraft. It spent a decade looking for planets outside the Solar System. Over 3000 confirmed exoplanets and another 3000 candidates were revealed during that time.
Its technique is very simple. The fields of stars were designed to detect the faint, regular dips in starlight that suggest an exoplanet is in motion around a star. This method is good for finding larger nearby exoplanets that are close to their stars.
Microlensing uses a quirk of gravity and a chance alignment. The mass of a planet creates a curvature of space-time. If that planet passes in front of a star, the curved space-time acts like a magnifying glass that causes the starlight to lighten.
It is possible to find exoplanets a long distance from Earth, circling their stars at large distances. Microlensing, an Earth-mass world 25,000 light-years away, picked up the most distant exoplanet discovered to date.
A team of researchers led by the University of Manchester recently thought to look at the data from the Kepler telescope for microlensing events from a window over several months in 2016 They identified 27 events, five of which were completely new.
Kerins explained that to see the effect at all it requires almost perfect alignment between the foreground planetary system and a background star.
The chance that a background star is affected by a planet is hundreds of millions to one. There are hundreds of millions of stars in the center of our universe. So he sat and watched them for three months.
One of the five events was K2-2016-BLG-0005Lb, and it looked promising for an exoplanet. To corroborate their signal, the team searched for data from five ground-based surveys that were looking at the same patch of sky.
They found that the signal was observed earlier and longer than the ground-based surveys. The team was able to determine that the exoplanet is around 1.1 times the mass of Jupiter, at a distance of 4.2 astronomical units. The average distance from the Sun to Jupiter is over five hundredths of a second.
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, allowing us to determine the mass of the exoplanet and its distance from its host star. It is basically Jupiter's identical twin in terms of mass and position, which is about 60 percent of the mass of our own Sun.
This finding has implications for the search for extraterrestrial life. There is evidence to suggest that Jupiter may have played a role in the conditions that allowed Earth to emerge and thrive on Earth.
The fact that an instrument not designed for microlensing was able to make this sort of detection bode well for upcoming instruments that will be designed for microlensing. The Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope will be looking for microlensing events when it launches in the next five years.
Our understanding of exoplanets could be changed by these detections.
Kerins said that they would learn how typical the architecture of our own solar system is. This is the beginning of a new chapter in our search for other worlds.
The research is available on arXiv.
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