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Hubble has discovered an alien planet that orbits 2 stars at once — and detected it in a weird way

Astronomers have spotted a planet 8,000 light-years away that orbits two stars. Several planets have been documented as revolving around two or more stars, but this is the first time one has been observed through the bending of light.

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The so-called circumbinary planet, called OGLE-2007-BLG-349, was first discovered in 2007 and was believed to be orbiting one star, with another mysterious object nearby.

hubble double star
The astronomers knew the planet was orbiting two stars because of how the light was bending.
NASA, ESA, and G. Bacon (STScI)

Closer inspection with the Hubble Space Telescope in this new research — which has been accepted to The Astronomical Journal — has shown that this other entity is actually another star, and the two are thought to be red dwarfs because of how bright they are.

"The ground-based observations suggested two possible scenarios for the three-body system: a Saturn-mass planet orbiting a close binary star pair or a Saturn-mass and an Earth-mass planet orbiting a single star," Professor David Bennett, who researches astrophysics and cosmology at the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center and is the paper's first author, said in a statement. "The model with two stars and one planet is the only one consistent with the Hubble data."

The two red dwarfs are 7 million miles apart, which is pretty close for stars, and OGLE orbits them roughly every seven years.

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But the weird part is how the planet was detected. Gravitational microlensing, or the bending of light, is caused by strong gravity around objects in space. Sometimes, two stars orbit a common center, and when and one passes in front of the other, gravity from the one closer to Earth bends and magnifies the light coming from the other.

It's thanks to the perfect alignment of the foreground and background stars that their light was magnified so that their signals were able to be seen so clearly by Hubble.

The team says the new microlensing technique provides more tools to help detect more exoplanets that could be orbiting multistar systems in the universe.

You can watch how the astronomers find planets thousands of light-years away by using gravitational microlensing in this video:

Science Research Space
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