Einstein predicted that high-mass objects can bend light. Now astronomers are using that fact to detect more exoplanets.
“The chance that a background star is affected this way by a planet is tens to hundreds of millions to one against.”A new paper titled “Kepler K2 Campaign 9: II. First space-based discovery of an exoplanet using microlensing” presents the discovery. It’s available online at the pre-print site arxiv.org and hasn’t been peer-reviewed yet. The lead author is Ph.D. student David Specht from The University of Manchester.
That effort expanded the possibilities of the Kepler data, even though NASA didn’t explicitly design the mission for microlensing. “Even through a space telescope not designed for microlensing studies, this result highlights the advantages for exoplanet microlensing discovery that come from continuous, high-cadence temporal sampling that is possible from space,” the authors of the new study write.
Five ground-based surveys also looked at the same sky area as Kepler did from April to July 2016. Kepler saw the microlensing anomaly before they did because Kepler’s over 100 million km closer. That delay allowed researchers to get a better idea of what they saw and where they were seeing it. This figure from the study shows the photometric Kepler data for the detected exoplanet K2-2016-BLG-0005Lb. The caustic crossing region is clearly visible and well sampled between ?? ? ?2450000=7515 and 7519. Image Credit: Specht et al. 2022.
This image shows an artist’s impression of 10 hot Jupiter exoplanets studied using the Hubble and Spitzer space telescopes. Astronomers think that about 10% of exoplanets are Hot Jupiters, but they’re detected more readily. Image Credit: By ESA/Hubble, CC BY 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=45642004