Astronomers have found one of the farthest known exoplanets from Earth residing 13,000 light-years away.
NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope has teamed up with a telescope on the ground, the Poland-based Optical Gravitational Lensing Experiment, or OGLE to find the remote gas planet.
Astronomers are using these blips to find and characterize planets up to 27,000 light-years away in the central bulge of the galaxy, where star crossings are more common.
The sun is located in the suburbs of the galaxy, about two-thirds of the way out from the center. The microlensing technique as a whole has yielded about 30 planet discoveries so far, with the farthest residing about 25,000 light-years away.
Of the approximately 30 planets discovered with microlensing so far, roughly half cannot be pinned down to a precise location. The result was like a planetary treasure map lacking in X's.
Spitzer has eyed 22 other microlensing events in collaboration with OGLE and several other ground-based telescopes. While these observations have not turned up new planets, the data are essential to learning the population statistics of stars and planets at the heart of our galaxy. Spitzer will watch approximately 120 additional microlensing events this summer.
The study is published in the Astrophysical Journal.
