Eamonn Kerins, Principal Investigator for the Science and Technology Facilities Council (STFC) grant that funded the work. “To see the effect at all requires almost perfect alignment between the foreground planetary system and a background star,” said Dr. The aim was to look for evidence of an exoplanet and its host star temporarily bending and magnifying the light from a background star as it passes by the line of sight.
To find an exoplanet using the microlensing effect the team searched through Kepler data collected between April and July 2016 when it regularly monitored millions of stars close to the center of the Galaxy. student, David Specht from The University of Manchester is the lead author on the new research. The study has been submitted to the journal Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society and has been made available as a preprint on. The system was found using gravitational microlensing, a prediction of Einstein’s Theory of Relativity, and is the first planet to be discovered from space in this way. The exoplanetary system is twice as distant as any previously seen by Kepler, which found over 2,700 confirmed planets before ceasing operations in 2018. The exoplanet, K2-201Lb, is almost identical to Jupiter in terms of its mass and distance from the sun, was discovered using data obtained in 2016 by NASA’s Kepler space telescope. First space-based discovery of an exoplanet using microlensing, Ī new study by an international team of astrophysicists, led by the Jodrell Bank Center for Astrophysics has presented the amazing new discovery of a near-identical twin of Jupiter orbiting a star at a colossal distance of 17,000 light years from Earth. The magenta cross-hair locates the microlensed source. Celestial North points upwards and East to the left. Color images from CFHT showing the field around K2-201 outside (left) and inside (right) of the caustic crossing.
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