The “Dead” Telescope Finds Jupiter’s Twin From Above The Grave
David Specht, a University of Manchester Ph.D. student, was the team’s leader. He used a phenomenon called gravity microlensing to find the exoplanet. This phenomenon was predicted by Einstein’s theory of relativity. Objects in space can be observed and studied closer when the light of a background star is warped, and so magnified by the gravity of a larger massive object.
The team used three months’ worth of observations by Kepler to determine the area of the sky where the planet lies in order to use the warped light of a distant star to find an exoplanet.
Kerins stated in the same statement that “to see the effect at any level requires almost perfect alignment between a background star and the foreground planet system.” The chance of a background star being affected in this manner by a planet is between tens and hundreds of millions. There are many millions of stars in the middle of our galaxy. Kepler sat down and observed them for three whole months.
Iain McDonald, an astronomer from the University of Manchester, developed a new search algorithm. The team collaborated with McDonald’s. They were able to identify five possible candidates from the data. The most obvious sign of an exoplanet was one of them. Ground-based observations on the same stretch of sky confirmed the signals Kepler saw about the exoplanet.
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