June 1, 2004:
An artist’s depiction of the giant planet orbiting the red dwarf 17,000 light years away.
Image: NASA/JPL
Somewhere between here and the center of the Milky Way galaxy, 17,000 light years away, there is a star, one of tens of billions that inhabit the plane of the galactic disk. It is a common and quite insignificant star, invisible to even the most powerful Earthly telescopes. There is nothing remarkable about it, except that it so happens that astronomers know a great deal more about this anonymous star than about almost any of its neighbors. They know, for example, that the star is relatively small, probably a red dwarf about one third the mass of our Sun. They also know that it has a companion – a giant planet, half again the size of Jupiter, orbiting at three times the distance of the Earth from the Sun. It is far and away the most distant planet ever discovered…
Get the Full Story How Einstein’s Theory Helps Scientists Discover Planets Thousands of Light Years Away
Greetings from Germany
Ulli
