Extremely distant exoplanet discovered

Excerpt from  thespacereporter.com

According to a NASA statement,

the agency’s Spitzer Space Telescope has taken part in the discovery of

one of the most distant exoplanets yet found. Spitzer observations were

combined with data from the Polish Optical Gravitational Lensing

Experiment’s Warsaw Telescope, part of the Las Campanas Observatory in

Chile. The newly found exoplanet is approximately 13,000 light-years

from Earth, and could yield new clues as to the distribution of planets

throughout the Milky Way.

The Warsaw Telescope gathers data through the phenomenon known as

microlensing, which occurs when a star passes in front of another, more

distant star as seen from Earth’s vantage point. The gravity of the

nearer star magnifies and intensifies the distant star’s light; any

planets orbiting the distant star appear as small disruptions in the

magnification. So far, the microlensing methods has identified around 30

exoplanets, the most distant of which is around 25,000 light-years

away.

However, the microlensing method cannot always show how far away are

the more distant stars and their planets; the distances to about half of

the exoplanets found with microlensing cannot be ascertained.

Fortunately, Spitzer is able to help. Located 128 million miles from

Earth, Spitzer is able to observe a microlensing event at a different

time from the Warsaw Telescope, a method called parallax. In the case of

the newly discovered exoplanet, the microlensing event was longer than

norman, lasting 150 days. 
Spitzer observed the event 20 days earlier

than Warsaw. This time delay allowed the distance to the newly found

planet to be calculated. With the distance, the planet’s mass,

approximately half that of Jupiter, also was determined.

“We’ve mainly explored our own solar neighborhood so far,” said

Sebastiano Calchi Novati of NASA’s Exoplanet Science Institute at the

California Institute of Technology. “Now we can use these single lenses

to do statistics on planets as a whole and learn about their

distribution in the galaxy.”

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Extremely distant exoplanet discovered