Scientists have discovered an "ice-giant" planet, similar to Uranus and Neptune, for the first time in a far away galaxy.
The international research team led by Radek Poleski, postdoctoral researcher at The Ohio State University, said that the newly discovered planet is so far away that they can't actually tell anything about its composition.
However, the astronomers said that its distance from its star suggests that it's an ice giant-and since the planet's orbit resembles that of Uranus, they are considering it to be a Uranus analog.
The newly discovered planet leads a turbulent existence: it orbits one star in a binary star system, with the other star close enough to disturb the planet's orbit and may help solve a mystery about the origins of the ice giants in our solar system.
Andrew Gould, professor of astronomy at Ohio State, said that nobody knows for sure why Uranus and Neptune are located on the outskirts of our solar system, when their models suggest that they should have formed closer to the sun. One idea is that they did form much closer, but were jostled around by Jupiter and Saturn and knocked farther out.
The astronomers spotted the solar system due to a phenomenon called gravitational microlensing-when the gravity of a star focuses the light from a more distant star and magnifies it like a lens. Very rarely, the signature of a planet orbiting the lens star appears within that magnified light signal.
The study was published online in The Astrophysical Journal.
