The Most Distant Exoplanet Ever Found by Kepler Is... Surprisingly Familiar

using a technique called gravitational microlensing rather than Kepler's primary detection method. The discovery has been submitted to the"Kepler was never designed to find planets using microlensing so, in many ways, it's amazing that it has done so,"The Kepler spacecraft was instrumental in blowing the field of exoplanet astronomy. It launched in 2009, and spent nearly 10 years hunting for planets outside the Solar System, or exoplanets.

Microlensing is a little trickier, leveraging a quirk of gravity and a chance alignment. The mass of a body such as a planet creates a gravitational curvature of space-time around it. If that planet then passes in front of a star, the curved space-time basically acts like a magnifying glass that very faintly and briefly causes the starlight to brighten.

One of the five events was K2-2016-BLG-0005Lb, and it looked promising for an exoplanet orbiting a star. So the team searched datasets from five ground-based surveys that were looking at the same patch of sky at the time Kepler was, to corroborate their signal.They found that Kepler observed the signal slightly earlier, and for slightly longer, than the five ground-based surveys. This combined dataset allowed the team to determine that the exoplanet is around 1.

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