Astronomers managed to discover a new planet within our Milky Way galaxy, taking advantage of a rare phenomenon predicted by Albert Einstein at the beginning of the 20th century. Research results publishedAstronomy & Astrophysics magazine.
The new planet, named AT2021uey b, is a gas giant similar to Jupiter or Saturn. It is 3262 light-years away from Earth, and its mass exceeds the mass of Jupiter by 1.3 times. This planet revolves around a small cold star. The ratio of the size of the planet and its star made it possible to detect it using a unique method – gravitational microlensing. Such a method would be much less effective for finding terrestrial planets.
Gravitational microlensing is a rare cosmic phenomenon in which a massive object (usually a star) temporarily appears in front of a distant star, amplifying its light due to its gravity. If a planet passes by during this alignment, there is a dimming of the light from a distant star—a sign of the planet’s presence. Detection requires the star, planet, and gravitational lens to be almost perfectly aligned, which is extremely rare. This time, scientists were lucky enough to record just such an alignment.
The discovery is also unique because of the location of the planet – it is not in the dense parts of the galaxy, such as the center or disk, where similar phenomena are usually recorded, but in the galactic halo – a relatively remote area. This is only the third time in history that an exoplanet has been discovered so far from the center of the Milky Way.
The first planet outside the solar system was discovered in 1995. Since then, scientists have identified almost 6,000 exoplanets of various sizes and types, but none of them has yet turned out to be an exact copy of our planetary system.
