Exoplanets from another galaxy spotted

Zeddicuz

The Kepler Space Telescope has found oodles of exoplanets, but now astroboffins have spotted the first exoplanets outside our galaxy. A group of astroboffins from the University of Oklahoma has become the first to demonstrate exoplanet observations in another galaxy – one that's 3.8 billion light years away, or one-third of the distance across the observable universe.[br][br]The discovery by a team led by professor Xinyu Dai and postdoc Eduardo Guerras, found the planets' signatures in the spectrum of a gravitationally-microlensed galaxy behind the black hole quasar RXJ 1131−1231. Gravitational microlensing refers to the phenomenon, predicted by Einstein, that gravity can bend light, resulting in an apparent magnification if the bodies are aligned the right way (from the point of view of the observer).[br][br]As the university explains, they believe the planets range in estimated mass from about the size of the moon, through to Jupiter-sized. The paper also explains that the researchers focussed on unbounded planets – that is, planets wandering around their galaxies rather than being part of a solar system – because planets orbiting stars don't show up separately from their hosts.

emperoralex

cool awesome

Zeddicuz

by emperoralex | 2018-02-06 01:18
cool awesome

surely