Scientists Find Planets Outside Of The Milky Way Galaxy For The First Time

[Judi Lynn]

4 February 2018, 4:28 pm EST By Allan Adamson Tech Times

Astrophysicists have reported finding for the first time a group of planets in another galaxy, outside the Milky Way. The breakthrough was made using microlensing.

Microlensing
The phenomenon involves astronomical objects such as a star or a galaxy in the foreground that causes the light from an object in the background to bend.

Microlensing makes it possible for astronomers to find otherwise invisible objects in the background such as a planet, when it passes across the bent light from the background object.

Scientists take advantage of this phenomenon to discover planets located too far away from Earth. The use of microlensing is currently the best method to find objects that are too far from Earth to be detected by telescopes.

More:
http://www.techtimes.com/articles/220303/20180204/scientists-find-planets-outside-of-the-milky-way-galaxy-for-the-first-time.htm

[Judi Lynn]

1. FOR THE FIRST TIME, PLANETS HAVE BEEN DISCOVERED IN ANOTHER GALAXY!

Article written: 3 Feb , 2018
by Matt Williams

The first confirmed discovery of a planet beyond our Solar System (aka. an Extrasolar Planet) was a groundbreaking event. And while the initial discoveries were made using only ground-based observatories, and were therefore few and far between, the study of exoplanets has grown considerably with the deployment of space-based telescopes like the Kepler space telescope.

As of February 1st, 2018, 3,728 planets have been confirmed in 2,794 systems, with 622 systems having more than one planet. But now, thanks to a new study by a team of astrophysicists from the University of Oklahoma, the first planets beyond our galaxy have been discovered! Using a technique predicting by Einstein’s Theory of General Relativity, this team found evidence of planets in a galaxy roughly 3.8 billion light years away.

The study which details their discovery, titled “Probing Planets in Extragalactic Galaxies Using Quasar Microlensing“, recently appeared in The Astrophysical Journal Letters. The study was conducted by Xinyu Dai and Eduardo Guerras, a postdoctoral researcher and professor from the Homer L. Dodge Department of Physics and Astronomy at the University of Oklahoma, respectively.

For the sake of their study, the pair used the Gravitational Microlensing technique, which relies on the gravitational force of distant objects to bend and focus light coming from a star. As a planet passes in front of the star relative to the observer (i.e. makes a transit), the light dips measurably, which can then be used to determine the presence of a planet.

More:
https://www.universetoday.com/138478/first-time-planets-discovered-another-galaxy/

[byronius]

2. I agree, very exciting!

[lunamagica]

3. K&R.

[Judi Lynn]

4. More Than a Trillion Planets Could Exist Beyond Our Galaxy

A new study gives the first evidence that exoplanets exist beyond the Milky Way.



Milky Way from Cerro Paranal observatory in the Atacama Desert, Chile.
PHOTOGRAPH BY BABAK TAFRESHI, NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC CREATIVE

By Elaina Zachos
PUBLISHED FEBRUARY 5, 2018

Scientists have long thought that exoplanets—planets beyond the solar system—were restricted to the confines of our Milky Way. After all, our galaxy is a warped disc about a hundred thousand light-years across and a thousand light-years thick, so it's incredibly difficult to see beyond that. But now, a new study is saying there could be extragalactic exoplanets.

The study, published February 2 in The Astrophysical Journal Letters, gives the first evidence that more than a trillion exoplanets could exist beyond the Milky Way.

BEYOND OUR GALAXY
Using information from NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory and a planet detection technique called microlensing to study a distant quasar galaxy , scientists at the University of Oklahoma found evidence that there are approximately 2,000 extragalactic planets for every one star beyond the Milky Way. Some of these exoplanets are as (relatively) small as the Moon, while others are as massive as Jupiter. Unlike Earth, most of the exoplanets are not tightly bound to stars, so they're actually wandering through space or loosely orbiting between stars.

More:
https://news.nationalgeographic.com/2018/02/exoplanets-discovery-milky-way-galaxy-spd/