The universe remains one of the mysterious things in existence, and scientists will continue to spend many years researching it. Recently, a group of astrophysicists offered some impressive news. According to them, they managed to find a group of planets in another galaxy, by using the microlensing mechanism.
Planets outside of the Milky Way
The latest news from researchers is the fact that there are planets outside of the Milky Way Galaxy. This is a historical moment, since it is the first time researchers manage to find any planets outside of yur Milky way.
The new planets have different sizes. “These small planets are the best candidate for the signature we observed in this study using the microlensing technique,” study researcher Xinyu Dai, from the College of Arts and Sciences of the University of Oklahoma declared.
As it turns out, the galaxy that contains the planet is 3 years apart. “Quasar microlensing provides a means to probe extragalactic planets in the lens galaxy, by studying the microlensing properties of emission close to the event horizon of the supermassive black hole of the background quasar, using the current generation telescopes,” the researchers also wrote in their study.
What is Microlensing?
Microlensing is a technique that allows researchers to fund any astronomical objects in the foreground, so that the light from background objects will bend. This technique made it easier for scientists to make discoveries.
Microlensing has also been used in the past, and scientists managed to make some important discoveries by using it. For example, microlensing was used when scientists discovered on of the most distant exoplanets every discovered, and that one is almost 13,000 light years away from Earth. Ever since, scientists managed to find more than 50 other planets by using the same technique.