Gravity-Bent Starlight Reveals a New Planet

dfab writes "The first experimental proof of Einstein's general theory has been revamped to discover planets around distant stars. Yesterday astronomers announced that a new technique called gravitational microlensing has found a star that hosts a roughly Jupiter-sized planet in a roughly Jupiter-sized orbit by observing its effect on the light from a bright star beyond that planetary system. See the NASA report or the gory details."

Comments

"The first experimental proof"

[DynaSoar]

...failed. Eddington's measurements were flawed, and the good ones weren't good enough. He was lucky. His unsupportable "result" was correct.

Interesting

[hords]

This image from the "gory details" gives you a quick understanding of what they mean. Pretty cool that they use one star to see the planet around another star.

The planet is the lens, not the focus

[jfengel]

Interesting. I had the idea that some star was being used to help focus light from the planet, acting as a gravitational lens and giving us a better view of the planet.

Instead, the planet is lensing some star beyond it, and then (later) so is the star that planet is around, as the planet+star moves past the object being focused.

This shows up as two sharp spikes in the brightness of the star over time (I guess one on each side of the planet, imperfectly aligned?) and one broader curve as it passes the star. The shape of the curves tell you how massive the planet and star are.

It looks like it's about Jupiter's size and a bit nearer in than Jupiter. That's comforting; thus far the only planets we ever seem to detect are bigger than Jupiter and closer than Mercury, which really boggles my mind. This system looks a lot more like ours.

Neat. What will those clever astrophysicists think of next.