Tuesday, December 10, 2019

Microlensing of Light Curves of A Distant Planet


 by lim ju boo

University of Oxford 


An analysis of the light curve of the microlensing event PA-99-N2 suggests the presence of a planet orbiting a star in the Andromeda Galaxy (2.54 ± 0.11 Mly).

 In late January 2018, a team of scientists led by Xinyu Dai claimed to have discovered a collection of about 2,000 rogue planets in the quasar microlens RX J1131-1231, which is 3.8 billion light-years distant. The bodies range in mass from that of the Moon to several Jupiter masses.[

The most distant potentially habitable planet confirmed is Kepler-443b, at 2,540 light-years distant although the unconfirmed planet KOI-5889.01 is over 5,000 light-years distant.

(Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_exoplanet_extremes)

I can quite understand measuring the distances of whole galaxies that lie at the edge of an Observable Universe by their red shifts.

But detecting a non- radiating planet in the Andromeda Galaxy is a different thing.  The ability of detecting, observing, and measuring the presence of just a planet or a group of them in another galaxy at such a horrendous distances mentioned above is taking things to the extreme. One can hardly see individual stars in a distant galaxy, let alone detecting planets orbiting around them.

This feat is truly remarkable to my feeble mind. My hats off to those teams of astronomers 

This is “light years” in the advancement of astronomy since the last planet Pluto was discovered by Clyde William Tombaugh in in 1930

Cheers to all the astronomers!

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