The Spitzer Space Telescope of NASA has teamed up with a ground telescope for finding a remote gas planet nearly 13,000 light years away, making it one of the most distant planets ever known. The discovery determines that Spitzer can be put to use from its unique perch in space for solving the puzzle as to how planets are distributed throughout the Milky Way galaxy.
Spitzer, which circles our Sun is presently 207 million km far from the planet Earth. When Spitzer watches a microlensing event with a telescope on Earth simultaneously, it catches the glimpse of a star brighten at a different time. This happens due to the distance between the telescopes as well as their unique vantage points.
When a star passes in front of another and its gravity functions as a lens to brighten and magnify the more distant star's light, a microlensing event occurs. If at all, the foreground star has a planet in the orbit around it, the planet may cause a blip in the magnification, which is called as the parallax. Spitzer is the first space telescope to make a microlens parallax measurement for a planet.
In case of the newfound planet, the duration of the microlensing event was quite long, which is about 150 days. The knowledge of the distance helped the scientists to determine the mass of the planet, which is half of Jupiter.
Featured Image Credit (nasa.gov)
