The candidate for the planet was found in a galaxy about 31 million light-years away.
The solar system the discovery of extraterrestrial planets has no longer been news. To date, nearly 5,000 of these exoplanets have been discovered. The number of discovered or candidates is increasing almost daily.
However, the exoplanet M51-ULS-1b is an exception. It is located not only outside our solar system but also within our galaxy. It was observed in the vortex galaxy about 31 million light-years away.
This is the first exoplanet found outside our Milky Way in our home galaxy.
Harvard Researchers at the & Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics discovered the planet in a galaxy in the constellation of Hounds, combining thousands of observations from the galaxy.
With their help Rosanne Di Stefanon led group observed a surprising momentary decrease in X-rays emitted by the M51-ULS-1 star in the galaxy.
The best explanation for the observations is the planet that passed in front of the star, which was named M51-ULS-1b after the star. The planet is estimated to be on the order of Saturn and orbit the star tens of times farther than the Earth Sun.
Observation enabled by the special nature of the M51-ULS-1.
It is another of the stars in the binary system and small in physical size. It’s probably a neutron star or a black hole. The body passing in front can block the radiation emitted by the star almost completely.
Indeed, Di Stefano’s group focused on these little binary stars in search of exoplanets from other galaxies.
“Of course, we didn’t know if stars like this usually have planets around them,” Di Stefano commented in a university bulletin.
Scientists are looking for exoplanets from three galaxies. In addition to the vortex galaxy, observations were made of the Windmill Galaxy and the Sombrerogalax using two space-based X-ray telescopes.
In total, scientists underwent 2,624 X-ray observations in search of planets.
The X-rays emitted by the M51-ULS-1 star were momentarily attenuated.
Now the finding is preliminary and is not expected to be confirmed, at least soon.
M51-ULS-1-1b orbits its residue so far that it will probably be tens or hundreds of years before the next overtake. Confirmed observation would require several similar, regularly recurring radiation attenuations.
However, in a university statement, Stefano stated that the most natural explanation for the observation would be an exoplanet.
The most natural the way to get confirmation of the observation would be to find more similar X-ray attenuations in both the Milky Way and our nearby galaxies. In this way, the way to identify exoplanets would be confirmed.
“The study presents a new possible way to detect planets from systems with X-ray sources,” the researchers wrote in their article.
“Because powerful sources of X-rays can also be detected in other galaxies, the search for exoplanets can be extended beyond the Milky Way.”
The observation was published in a scientific journal Nature Astronomy.
Read more: Scientists were able to observe the planet for the first time outside the Milky Way
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