Galaxy (Photo : REUTERS)
The Spitzer Space Telescope of the NASA origin was successful in discovering a very far exo planet.
This telescope's data was combined with the data of the Optical Gravitational Lensing Experiment's Warsaw Telescope which is owned by Las Campanas Centre in Chile. The newly-found exo planet is 13,000 light years away from earth.
This has opened up new channels for astronomers and scientists that the distribution of planets in the galaxy is very heavily scattered, states The Space Reporter. This is one of the most distant exo planets to be found in the history of discovery of planets, according to Omni Feed.
There is one more telescope which took part in this study, the Warsaw telescope which uses the phenomenon of micro lensing to gather all the data. Micro lensing is nothing but observing the mass in the universe when one star passes another star. When two stars come close to each other, the star which is nearer to earth will emit a gravitational pull on the star which is further from the earth, which in turn intensifies the latter's light. This method of micro lensing was successful in discovering over 30 exo planets till date.
This method is however, not always the best method to discover an exo planet, the report says. It is not able to discover anything beyond a certain point and hence cannot be always relied upon. The Spitzer comes handy in such situations as it can identify stars as far away as 128 million light years from earth.
Warsaw and Spitzer identified this exo planet 20 days apart of each other's discovery. This was a blessing in disguise as the distance of the exo planet was rendered more accurate due to the delay.
