To date, scientists have discovered over 300 exoplanets, which are planets orbiting stars other than our own sun. Recently, a group of astronomers may have detected another one, as Universe Today reports. In and of itself, that’s not news–except that this one may be in another galaxy.
It turns out that one specific star in the Andromeda Galaxy–which is over two million light-years away–has some kind of object orbiting it that’s about six times the mass of Jupiter. At that size and distance, it could be either a planet or a brown dwarf star, but astronomers are leaning toward the former.
To find the exoplanet, the report said that the astronomers used a technique called pixel-lensing, which is essentially gravitational microlensing: looking for bent light rays when they pass close to a massive object, as per Einstein’s general theory of relativity. (Image credit: NASA/Tony Hallas)