A team of scientists has identified a new planet extremely similar to Jupiter, but located nearly 17,000 light-years away, using data from the decommissioned Kepler Space Telescope. After reviewing Kepler data from 2016, the planet K2-2016-BLG-0005Lb was discovered. It has nearly the same mass as Jupiter and orbits its star at about the same distance as Jupiter from the sun.
As a result, it is called a “near Jupiter analog.” The researchers looked at data from the 2016 Kepler K2 mission, specifically from Campaign 9. A new search strategy discovered five likely microlens signals from the dataset (as described in a 2021 study), one of which was declared a “bright” light scattering event. in the cosmic bulge, according to the latest analysis.
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The Optical Gravitational Lensing Experiment (OGLE-IV), the Canada-France-Hawaii Telescope (CFHT), Microlensing Observations in Astrophysics (MOA-2), the Korean Microlensing Telescope Network (KMTNet), and the United Kingdom InfraRed Telescope are five-based investigations simultaneously scanning the same location in space (UKIRT).
According to the reports, the data from all of these observatories was used by researchers to validate Kepler’s findings and better describe the Jupiter-like planet. While these ads appeared in the right place at the right time, the authors note that “none of the ground-based studies emphasized K2-2016-BLG-0005 in advance” of the 2021 study.
The newly found exoplanet is located 17,000 light-years from Earth. It has about the same mass as Jupiter and orbits its parent star in the same way. This planet is “one of Jupiter’s closest cousins yet to be detected by any means,” scientists say. The alien planet is also nearly twice as far from Earth as the next furthest of Kepler’s hundreds of planets.
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Using the new technology, astronomers were able to significantly increase Kepler’s range. Surprisingly, Kepler data can be used to detect a planet, despite the fact that Kepler was designed to find planets using another technique known as the transit method. It looks for small changes in a star’s brightness caused by a planet moving between us and the star.
During his stay on the planet, Kepler discovered about 2,600 exoplanets using this approach. Although Kepler is no longer operational, NASA’s next Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope, expected to launch later this decade, is being developed specifically to use microlenses to identify planets. Kerins expects the Roman telescope to reveal the planetary architecture of distant nearby stars and the number of potentially Earth-like planets in the Milky Way, among other things.
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