Spitzer Space Telescope Finds New Planet 21
Aspiring Astronomer sends word of the discovery of one of the farthest known exoplanets. NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope has teamed up with a telescope on the ground to find a remote gas planet about 13,000 light-years away, making it one of the most distant planets known. The discovery demonstrates that Spitzer -- from its unique perch in space -- can be used to help solve the puzzle of how planets are distributed throughout our flat, spiral-shaped Milky Way galaxy. Are they concentrated heavily in its central hub, or more evenly spread throughout its suburbs? 'We don't know if planets are more common in our galaxy's central bulge or the disk of the galaxy, which is why these observations are so important,' said Jennifer Yee of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, Cambridge, Massachusetts, and a NASA Sagan fellow. Yee is the lead author of one of three new studies that appeared recently in the Astrophysical Journal describing a collaboration between astronomers using Spitzer and the Polish Optical Gravitational Lensing Experiment, or OGLE."
Trantor (Score:2)
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Just follow a road, any road. They all lead there.
Oh, that's odd. When I tried that, I ended up in Rome.
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I just want to find Trantor, so I can get home.
Just look for where all the stars end, Tim S.
Link to the full article, freely available ... (Score:5, Informative)
... thanks to arXiv:
http://arxiv.org/abs/1501.0410... [arxiv.org]
This event is VERY interesting and unusual because the microlensing event was observed from two very different places: on Earth, and from the Spitzer Space Telescope, which is many millions of km away from the Earth. Gravitational lensing occurs when a background star and a lensing star line up exactly in the same direction, as seen from an observer. Because Spitzer was so far away, it saw the lensing star line up with the background star first; then, as the lensing star moved in its orbit around the center of the Milky Way, the lensing star eventually lined up with the background star as seen from Earth, about 18 days later.
This lag in time between two widely separated observers seeing a lensing event will help us to figure out exactly how the two stars involved in the event were moving, and where they are, and other properties. Since most telescopes are located on Earth, in basically the same place, we almost never get this extra information.
Rah, rah, Spitzer! Rah, rah, OGLE!
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