Identical Twin Of Jupiter

Yes, you have read it correctly! Astronomers have found an identical twin of the planet Jupiter, which has the same mass and is at the same location from its star as Jupiter is from the Sun.

Dubbed K2–2016-BLG-0005Lb, the exoplanet has been found by an international team of astrophysicists by using the data gained in the year 2016 by NASA’s Kepler space telescope. Further, the telescope has so far detected approximately 2700 planets in the Milky Way galaxy, but this planet, i.e. Jupiter-like planet is twice as far as any seen earlier.

It is Located 17,000 light-years from our planet Earth, scientists have used Albert Einstein’s Theory of Relativity and a method called gravitational microlensing to spot this miraculous world as it temporarily bent and magnified the light from a background star.

The study has been released as a preprint on ArXiv.org and further submitted to the journal Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.

This study has been led by Jodrell Bank Centre for Astrophysics and also PhD student, David Specht from The Uni of Manchester, the team searched via Kepler data collected between April and July 2016 when it continuously observed millions of stars close to the centre of the Galaxy.

“To see the effect at all needs almost perfect alignment between the foreground planetary system and a background star. The chance that a background star is influenced this way by a planet is 10s to hundreds of millions to one against. But there are hundreds of millions of stars towards the centre of our galaxy. So, Kepler just sat and watched them for three months,” Eamonn Kerins, Principal Investigator for the (STFC) Science and Technology Facilities Council, who started the project, stated in a statement.

Let us all wait for further info!