NASA discovered the first planet outside the galaxy

NASA's observatory has detected the first sign of a planet outside the solar system.

In an announcement on Monday, NASA said the planet could exist in the Vortex Galaxy - the spiral galaxy Messier 51 (M51) as recorded by NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory.

An exoplanet is a planet outside our solar system, usually orbiting a star, rather than the sun as in our galaxy. To date, all other planets have been found in the Milky Way, and most of them have been found less than 3,000 light-years from Earth.

The region that produces bright X-rays is very small, and so a planet passing in front of it would be very easy to detect, as it would block most or all of the X-rays. This allows for exoplanets. detected at much longer distances.

However, researchers will have to wait a long time to confirm whether they discovered an extragalactic exoplanet. Due to the large orbit, the planetary candidate will not pass in front of the partner for another 70 years, meaning that it could take decades to confirm this observation.

If the planet does exist, experts say it would have to survive a supernova explosion that created a neutron star or black hole. And in the future, the companion star could also explode as a supernova and blow up the planet again with extremely high levels of radiation.

The researchers will search the archives of both Chandra, which has important data sets for about 20 galaxies, and the European Space Agency's XMM-Newton satellite, to find additional exoplanet candidates. in other galaxies.

They add that another interesting research direction is to look for X-ray transitions in the Milky Way's X-ray sources to discover nearby new planets in unusual environments.