'Super Earth' discovered 25,000 light-years away

The newly discovered exoplanet is four times the mass of Earth, orbiting the star as small as one-tenth the Sun.

The astronomers headed by Dr. Antonio Herrera Martin, a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Canterbury, New Zealand, discovered that the exoplanet OGLE-2018-BLG-0677Lb has an orbit similar to Earth. This "Super Earth" orbits the host star, nearly 25,000 light-years from us, becoming one of the most remote planets ever discovered. The team said that 66.9% of this star system is located in a dense star region extending towards the center of the Milky Way.

OGLE-2018-BLG-0677Lb is one of the furthest planets ever discovered. (Photo: IFL Science).

Martin and colleagues used a technique called gravitational amplification , based on the fact that one star moves directly in front of another star when viewed from Earth. Light from the farther star is amplified under the influence of the gravitational force of the nearby star according to Albert Einstein's general theory of relativity. If there is an additional planet, the effect will be enhanced in a short time.

"The combined gravitational pull of the planet and the host star causes the light from the distant background star to amplify in a special way. We use telescopes around the world to measure the light breaking effect. " Martin explained.

The researchers used two separate systems to detect the new super Earth, the Optical Gravity Amplifier Experiment (OGLE) using telescopes in Chile and the Korea Amplified Telescope Network (KMTNet). including 3 similar telescopes in Chile, Australia and South Africa. Although these projects record 3,000 amplification events each year, most are created by stars without the accompanying planets. Up to now, only 90 exoplanets have been discovered through gravitational amplification.

4 times bigger than Earth, OGLE-2018-BLG-0677Lb is one of the lowest mass planets detected by gravitational amplification. It orbits the star only 10% larger than the Sun, about the distance the distance from Venus to the Sun. A year on this planet is 617 days long.

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