NASA | GSFC | STScI | HubbleSite | WM Keck Observatory | 2015 July 30
[img3="Credit: NASA, ESA, and A. Feild (STScI)"]http://www.nasa.gov/sites/default/files ... ge_web.jpg[/img3][hr][/hr]NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope and the W. M. Keck Observatory in Hawaii have made independent confirmations of an exoplanet orbiting far from its central star. The planet was discovered through a technique called gravitational microlensing.
This finding opens a new piece of discovery space in the extrasolar planet hunt: to uncover planets as far from their central stars as Jupiter and Saturn are from our Sun. The Hubble and Keck Observatory results will appear in two papers in the July 30 edition of The Astrophysical Journal.
The large majority of exoplanets cataloged so far are very close to their host stars because several current planet-hunting techniques favor finding planets in short-period orbits. But this is not the case with the microlensing technique, which can find more distant and colder planets in long-period orbits that other methods cannot detect.
Microlensing occurs when a foreground star amplifies the light of a background star that momentarily aligns with it. If the foreground star has planets, then the planets may also amplify the light of the background star, but for a much shorter period of time than their host star. The exact timing and amount of light amplification can reveal clues to the nature of the foreground star and its accompanying planets.
The system, cataloged as OGLE-2005-BLG-169, was discovered in 2005 by the Optical Gravitational Lensing Experiment (OGLE), the Microlensing Follow-Up Network (MicroFUN), and members of the Microlensing Observations in Astrophysics (MOA) collaborations-groups that search for extrasolar planets through gravitational microlensing. ...
Confirmation of the Planetary Microlensing Signal and Star and Planet Mass Determinations for Event OGLE-2005-BLG-169 - D. P. Bennett et al
- Astrophysical Journal 808(2):169 (2015 Aug 01) DOI: 10.1088/0004-637X/808/2/169 (pdf)
- Astrophysical Journal 808(2):170 (2015 Aug 01) DOI: 10.1088/0004-637X/808/2/170 (pdf)