'Dead' telescope discovers Jupiter's twin from beyond the grave
By Chelsea Gohd published about 2 hours ago
This is the most distant exoplanet Kepler ever found.
NASA's Kepler space telescope has spotted a Jupiter look-alike in a new discovery, even though the instrument stopped operations four years ago.
An international team of astrophysicists using NASA's Kepler space telescope, which ceased operations in 2018, have discovered an exoplanet similar to Jupiter located 17,000 light-years from Earth, making it the farthest exoplanet ever found by Kepler. The exoplanet, officially designated K2-2016-BLG-0005Lb, was spotted in data captured by Kepler in 2016. Throughout its lifetime, Kepler observed over 2,700 now-confirmed planets.
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The team, led by David Specht, a Ph.D. student at the University of Manchester, took advantage of a phenomenon known as gravitational microlensing to spot the exoplanet. With this phenomenon, which was predicted by Einstein's theory of relativity, objects in space can be seen and studied closer when the light from a background star is warped and thus magnified by the gravity of a closer massive object.
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"To see the effect at all requires almost perfect alignment between the foreground planetary system and a background star," Kerins added in the same statement. "The chance that a background star is affected this way by a planet is tens to hundreds of millions to one against. But there are hundreds of millions of stars towards the center of our galaxy. So Kepler just sat and watched them for three months."
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https://www.livescience.com/dead-telesceope-spots-jupiter-twin?utm_source=notification
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