Discover a new planet outside the Milky Way

The first planet outside our galaxy is a really important and groundbreaking discovery, because although of course we know there must be a lot of them – according to research from 2016, there could be as many as two trillion other galaxies in visible space, and space itself. Milky Way It is expected to contain about 100 billion other planets – we haven’t been able to spot them yet.

We have already observed exoplanets or planets outside our group Solar SystemIt revolves around a star other than the sun. This first happened in 1988, and since then we have discovered and confirmed more than 4,000 such planets. Except that they were all in our galaxy, and most of them were 3,000 light-years from Earth or closer. That’s only changing because NASA thinks it’s noticed the first evidence of a planet orbiting the Milky Way.

A team of scientists led by Rosanne Di Stefano of Harvard University’s Center for Astrophysics was using the Chandra X-ray Space Telescope to observe transits in a spiral galaxy. Messier 51 (M51), also called vortex galaxyAbout 23 million light-years away. Crossing is the passage of a celestial body through the shield of another celestial body, which is observed when both the body and the observer are on the same line.

In this case, the planet passed through its star’s disk, blocking some of its light. Scientists say the process took about three hours, and the information collected indicates that the planet may be the size of Saturn, orbiting a black hole or a neutron star twice as far from the sun as Saturn. To confirm the discovery, however, more data is needed, which will be possible in some…70 years, because due to the planet’s massive orbit, the next transit will occur in that time, giving us another 3 hour window to search.