Scientists have managed to find over 5,000 exoplanets that are orbiting suns apart from ours. But all of them reside in our galaxy, the Milky Way.?
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However, now, NASA¡¯s Chandra X-Ray Telescope has stumbled across a planet that¡¯s roughly 28 million light-years away from ours, in the Messier 51 galaxy.?
Dr Rosanne Di Stefano and her colleagues were on the lookout for dips in the brightness of X-ray received from something called an X-ray binary that consists of a neutron star or black hole that pulls in gas from a nearby orbiting companion star.?
This causes the material near the neutron star/black home to heat up exponentially with it glowing at X-ray wavelengths.?
Now, this region is really small in size and can easily be blocked if a planet would come in front of it, that¡¯s exactly what happened with the discovery in the Messier 51 galaxy.
The aforementioned method was used in the detection of the exoplanet candidate in a binary system dubbed M51-ULS-1. The binary system is home to a black hole or neutron star orbiting a companion star that has a mass of 20 times that of our Sun.?
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The X-ray transit detected with the help of Chandra¡¯s data went on for three hours during which the X-ray emissions toned down to zero. Based on this and some other factors, researchers were able to denote that the planet discovered could be around the same size as Saturn orbiting the neutron star or black hole at more than double the distance of Saturn and the Sun.??
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It goes without saying that more data would be required to verify the interpretation as an extragalactic exoplanet.?
Rosanne Di Stefano said in a statement, ¡°We are trying to open up a whole new arena for finding other worlds by searching for planet candidates at X-ray wavelengths, a strategy that makes it possible to discover them in other galaxies.¡±
Co-author Nia Imara of the University of California at Santa Cruz further added, ¡°Unfortunately to confirm that we¡¯re seeing a planet we would likely have to wait decades to see another transit. And because of the uncertainties about how long it takes to orbit, we wouldn't know exactly when to look.¡±
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