NASA has discovered the first planet outside the Milky Way

The possibility of an exoplanet outside the Milky Way.

In recent days, a group of scientists has discovered a planet 40% larger than Jupiter that has incredibly survived the explosion of a star similar to the Sun and Now it orbits around the white dwarf resulting from the change of the aforementioned star.

According to the researchers, this satellite image can reveal what will happen in the very distant future of the solar system inhabited by Earth.

“Earth’s future may not be so optimistic because it is much closer to the sun (…) in the event that humanity wanted to go to Jupiter or Saturn’s moon before the sun burned Earth during its giant red phase, we would still orbit the sun, although that we cannot rely on the Sun’s heat as a white dwarf for long,” explained David Bennett, co-author of the paper.

Now, for this to happen, more than 5 billion years, so there is plenty of time to continue investigations in space and announce new discoveries like the one reported by NASA on October 25.

According to a report from the US space agency published in Nature Astronomy, with the help of the Chandra X-ray observatory, it was possible to see what experts classified as The first possible planet discovered outside the Milky Way.

Possible candidate exoplanets are in the spiral galaxy Messier 51 (M51), also called Whirlpool Galaxy due to its distinctive appearanceExplained NASA through a press release.

It must be remembered that a planet outside the solar system is considered as such as outside the solar system of which the Earth is a part, although this new candidate is The first is a peek at the Milky Way, which is a milestone in space research.

Image of a possible exoplanet.
Image of a possible exoplanet.

According to NASA, the exoplanets discovered so far are mostly located about 3,000 light-years from Earth, while the potential astronomer detected in M51 would be thousands of times further away than those in the way. 28 million light years.

“We are trying to open up a whole new field of finding other worlds by searching for candidate planets at X-ray wavelengths, a strategy that makes it possible to detect them in other galaxies,” said Rosanne Di Stefano of the Center for Astrophysics. Harvard & amp. Smithsonian (CfA) in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

To reach this first point in the investigation, the experts had to use a technique based on blocking the star’s light by a potential planet as it passed in front of the bright star, Although this time it was based on X-rays emitted by “a neutron star or black hole extracting gas from a closely orbiting companion star.”

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However, not everything is happy in this situation, because the discovery can only be taken as a possibility, and it seems that the hypothesis will not be able to verify it in several decades considering that “the large orbit of the candidate planet means that it will not return to transit In front of his double partner For about 70 years“.

“Unfortunately, to confirm that we see a planet, we will probably have to wait decades to see another transit (…) Because of the uncertainty about how long it takes to orbit, we don’t know exactly when to look.Co-author Nia Imara of the University of California, Santa Cruz, concluded.

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