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Bangalore: Earth and its seven solar system siblings may have a distant (really distant) cousin outside the Milky Way, but it could take decades for us to know for sure.
Astronomers have detected signs of a planet outside the Milky Way via NASA’s orbiting Chandra X-ray Observatory. If confirmed as a planet, it would be the first extragalactic exoplanet to be observed (an exoplanet is a planet outside the Solar System).
This has the potential to open up a new field of extragalactic exoplanetary space with X-ray telescopes, allowing us to detect stars and now planetary systems at vast distances.
The possible planet Messier 51 (M51) is located 28 million light-years away in the Milky Way. It is thought to be the size of Saturn, orbiting its host—a neutron star or a black hole—at a distance twice that of Saturn from the Sun (1.4 billion kilometers)
The findings were made in collaboration with researchers from the US, Canada, China and Australia, and the authors propose the descriptor “exoplanet” for an extragalactic exoplanet.
study was published in the magazine nature astronomy This week.
Read also: NASA’s latest exoplanet discovery could help explain how planets evolve
detection and analysis
The astronomers involved in the discovery detected it through the transit method, where a drop in a star’s brightness – as seen from Earth – is observed when a planet passes in front of it.
The Chandra telescope made this observation at X-ray wavelengths, observing a large, three-year-long dip in X-rays coming from the host star.
Chandra – named for the physicist Subramaniam Chandrasekhar, which reduced the maximum mass of stars collapsing into white dwarfs – is found out earlier Exoplanets within the Milky Way using the same technology.
After much analysis, the team ruled out alternative explanations for the X-ray dip, including fluctuations caused by other transiting objects or dust and gases.
The research began specifically looking for planets around X-ray binary stars, two stars undergoing mass transfer. The more massive the star in the X-ray binary, the less massive the star feeds on, sucking out its matter.
A massive star is a denser object, usually a neutron star or a black hole (Both the consequences of the explosion of a star), able to feed on a star. As matter from the star approaches the denser object, it heats up and glows and releases energy in the form of X-rays.
Since some of the earliest exoplanets discovered so far were orbiting fast-spinning pulsars that were born from X-ray binaries, the authors theorized that these systems could potentially hold planets as well.
The more massive object in this binary is M51-ULS.
Being a mass-transfer binary, the object, which is either a neutron star or a black hole – two of the densest objects in the universe – is one of the brightest X-ray emitters. It is classified as an Ultraluminous Supersoft Source (ULS).
The less-massive-but-larger object is an orbiting companion star that is 20 times the mass of the Sun, and is losing mass to a compact object (as seen in the illustration in the main image).
‘Exoplanet M51-ULS-1’
The name of the exoplanet candidate is M51-ULS-1. The size of the planet is subtracted from its physical transit in front of it compact object, which completely blocked X-rays for three hours.
The exoplanet is thought to be orbiting at a distance that is twice the orbit of Saturn, which also fits the expected distance that a planet must have in order to survive. violent supernova, during which its host star became a neutron star or black hole.
The candidate needs to be confirmed as a planet, but its orbital period and distance from Earth mean that the body will transit once again only 70 years later.
“Unfortunately to confirm that we are seeing a planet, we may have to wait decades to see another transit,” co-author Nia Imara of the University of California at Santa Cruz was quoted as saying. a NASA release. “And because of uncertainties about how long it takes to orbit, we won’t know when to look.”
(Edited by Sunanda Ranjan)
Read also: NASA telescope finds exoplanet trio that may reveal secrets of planet formation
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