From: LARRY KLAES (ljk4_at_msn.com)
Date: Thu Apr 15 2004 - 10:14:30 PDT
----- Original Message -----
From: NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory<mailto:info_at_jpl.nasa.gov>
To: ljk4_at_msn.com<mailto:ljk4_at_msn.com>
Sent: Thursday, April 15, 2004 1:02 PM
Subject: Cosmic Magnifying Glass: Distant Star Reveals Planet
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News Release: 2004-103 April 15, 2004
Cosmic Magnifying Glass: Distant Star Reveals Planet
Like Sherlock Holmes holding a magnifying glass to unveil hidden
This marks the first discovery of a planet around a star beyond
"The real strength of microlensing is its ability to detect low-mass
The newly discovered star-planet system is 17,000 light years away, in
In most prior microlensing observations, scientists saw a typical
Dr. Bohdan Paczynski of Princeton University, Princeton, N.J., an OGLE
"I'm thrilled to see the prediction come true with this first definite
Microlensing can easily detect extrasolar planets, because a planet
"It's time-critical to catch stars while they are aligned, so we must
NASA and the National Science Foundation fund the Optical
Images and information about the latest research are available on the
-end-
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: Thu Apr 15 2004 - 10:53:45 PDT
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Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif.
NASA Headquarters, Washington, D.C.
clues, modern day astronomers used cosmic magnifying effects to reveal
a planet orbiting a distant star.
Earth's solar system using gravitational microlensing. A star or
planet can act as a cosmic lens to magnify and brighten a more distant
star lined up behind it. The gravitational field of the foreground
star bends and focuses light, like a glass lens bending and focusing
starlight in a telescope. Albert Einstein predicted this effect in his
theory of general relativity and confirmed it with our Sun.
planets," said Dr. Ian Bond of the Institute for Astronomy in
Edinburgh, Scotland, lead author of a paper appearing in the May 10
Astrophysical Journal Letters. The discovery was made possible through
cooperation between two international research teams: Microlensing
Observations in Astrophysics (Moa) and Optical Gravitational Lensing
Experiment (Ogle). Well-equipped amateur astronomers might use this
technique to follow up future discoveries and help confirm planets
around other stars.
the constellation Sagittarius. The planet, orbiting a red dwarf parent
star, is most likely one-and-a-half times bigger than Jupiter. The
planet and star are three times farther apart than Earth and the Sun.
Together, they magnify a farther, background star some 24,000 light
years away, near the Milky Way center.
brightening pattern, or light curve, indicating a star's gravitational
pull was affecting light from an object behind it. The latest
observations revealed extra spikes of brightness, indicating the
existence of two massive objects. By analyzing the precise shape of
the light curve, Bond and his team determined one smaller object is
only 0.4 percent the mass of a second, larger object. They concluded
the smaller object must be a planet orbiting its parent star.
team member, first proposed using gravitational microlensing to detect
dark matter in 1986. In 1991, Paczynski and his student, Shude Mao,
proposed using microlensing to detect extrasolar planets. Two years
later, three groups reported the first detection of gravitational
microlensing by stars. Earlier claims of planet discoveries with
microlensing are not regarded as definitive, since they had too few
observations of the apparent planetary brightness variations.
planet detection through gravitational microlensing," Paczynski said.
He and his colleagues believe observations over the next few years may
lead to the discovery of Neptune-sized, and even Earth-sized planets
around distant stars.
dramatically affects the brightness of a background star. Because the
effect works only in rare instances, when two stars are perfectly
aligned, millions of stars must be monitored. Recent advances in
cameras and image analysis have made this task manageable. Such
developments include the new large field-of-view Ogle-III camera, the
Moa-II 1.8 meter (70.8 inch) telescope, being built, and cooperation
between microlensing teams.
share our data as quickly as possible," said Ogle team-leader Dr.
Andrzej Udalski of Poland's Warsaw University Observatory. Udalski in
Poland and Paczynski in the U.S lead the Polish/American project. It
operates at Las Campanas Observatory in Chile, run by the Carnegie
Institution of Washington, and includes the world's largest
microlensing survey on the 1.3 meter (51-inch) Warsaw Telescope.
Gravitational Lensing Experiment in the U.S. The Polish State
Committee for Scientific Research and Foundation for Polish Science
funds it in Poland. Microlensing Observations in Astrophysics is
primarily a New Zealand/Japanese group, with collaborators in the
United Kingdom and U.S. New Zealand's Marsden Fund, NASA and National
Science Foundation, Japan's Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports,
Science, and Technology, and the Japan Society support it for the
Promotion of Science.
Internet at
http://jpl.convio.net/site/R?i=jiG17Jo75kZO-3BCLCXxIg