Polish astronomers discover previously unknown planet

Photo: Glowimages

The so-called exoplanet (extrasolar planet) was spotted by a team working under Radek Poleski, a postdoctoral researcher at The Ohio State University.

The newly discovered entity is believed to be an 'ice giant', like Uranus and Neptune, which are part ice, part gas.

Astronomers were able to pinpoint the planet thanks to gravitational microlensing, a phenomemon dependent on the gravity of a star focusing light from a more distant star and magnifying it like a lens.

"Only microlensing can detect these cold ice giants that, like Uranus and Neptune, are far away from their host stars," Poleski said, as cited by The Ohio State University's official web site.

"This discovery demonstrates that microlensing is capable of discovering planets in very wide orbits," he added.

"We were lucky to see the signal from the planet, its host star, and the companion star.

"If the orientation had been different, we would have seen only the planet, and we probably would have called it a free-floating planet.”

11 Poles from Warsaw University's Astronomical Observatory were among those working on the project.

To date, over 1800 exoplanets have been discovered by astronomers, spread across 1145 planetary systems. (nh)

Source: PAP, osu.edu