Galaxy Zoo Talk

Planets found out of the Milky Way???

  • ramberts by ramberts

    I would love it if someone here could explain a little bit more about this. The news channel articles don't make a ton of sense to me. The scientists observed distant powerful quasars that produced gravitational lensing to look at emission lines within a cluster of stars in a galaxy and were able to determine that many of the stars have planets? How are they able to confirm with 100% certainty that they are planets if they can't detect the wobble or overpassing light? Is it 100% confirmed with the scientific community that this new way of detecting planets is legit? If anyone has anything to add to this to help me understand this I would be grateful, I'm not a physics guru but I love reading about exoplanets and galaxies, and always thought we were decades away from being able to find planets in other galaxies. This article caught me by surprise!
    http://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.3847/2041-8213/aaa5fb/meta

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  • Budgieye by Budgieye moderator

    It looks like no one else understands it either. The news reports don't attempt to interpret it to the lay reader.

    We show that a population of unbound planets between stars with masses
    ranging from Moon to Jupiter masses is needed to explain the frequent
    Fe Kα line energy shifts observed in the gravitationally lensed quasar
    RXJ 1131–1231 at a lens redshift of z = 0.295 or 3.8 billion lt-yr
    away.

    ‘We analyzed the high frequency of the signature by modelling the data
    to determine the mass.’

    So, lots of blips= lots of things between stars.

    This is as far as I understood it.

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  • ramberts by ramberts

    It will be interesting to me on follow-up studies. The verbiage used in the abstract is surprising to me as well because there have been planets found bigger than Jupiter orbiting very close to stars and why they used the Moon as the smallest object. Seems like a strange range, I don't think they have found anything the moon's size outside of our Solar System as far as I have read yet they can detect moon size objects billions of light years away without directly observing the object...

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