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Until now, about 5,000 “exoplanets” have been identified, but all of them have been located within our galaxy, the Milky Way.
Astronomers may have discovered the first planet discovered outside the Milky Way, 28 million light years from Earth. Experts using NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory and the European Space Agency’s XMM-Newton telescope may have discovered the planet in the spiral galaxy Messier 51 (M51), also known as the Whirlpool galaxy.
All the exoplanets that have been discovered so far (more than 4,000) have been detected in the Milky Way, most within 3,000 light years of Earth. If confirmed, this planet would be “thousands of times farther away than the Milky Way,” NASA said in a statement.
“ We are trying to open up a whole new field for finding other worlds by searching for planet candidates at X-ray wavelengths, a strategy that makes it possible to discover them in other galaxies, ” said lead study author Rosanne Di Stefano. , from the Center for Astrophysics at Harvard University, in a statement.
The potential planet was found in a transit-based method, which uses the passing of a celestial object in front of a star that sees the star’s light decline to confirm the object’s existence. This method analyzes the X-ray falls and not the light from the star as the planet passes in front of it.
These objects typically contain a neutron star or a black hole that draws gas from a nearby orbiting companion star. Material near the neutron star or black hole overheats and glows at X-ray wavelengths.
Because the region that produces bright X-rays is small, a planet passing in front of it could block most or all of the X-rays, making the transit easier to detect.
The team members used this technique to detect the exoplanet candidate in a binary system called M51-ULS-1.
Di Stefano says that the techniques that have been so successful in finding exoplanets in the Milky Way are broken down by observing other galaxies. This is partly because the large distances involved reduce the amount of light reaching the telescope and cause many objects to crowd into a small space (if viewed from Earth), making it difficult to resolve individual stars. (I)
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