A group of astronomers from Italy's National Institute of Nuclear Physics (INFN) believes they have found clues to what would be the first planet discovered outside the Milky Way . The new celestial body appears to have a mass six times that of Jupiter and is located in the orbit of a star in the Andromeda galaxy.
To detect it, Francesco De Paolis and his colleagues used an observational method based on "gravitational distortion" . According to this principle, which Albert Einstein predicted in his theory of relativity, a large mass can bend a beam of light from a star around it and provide an observer at a great distance with images of its appearance. In this case, De Paolis analyzed a beam of light detected on Earth in 2004, so it has not yet been possible to observe the celestial body directly to confirm the validity of the method.
"So far about 350 exoplanets have been discovered in the vicinity of our galaxy ," explained De Paolis, who publishes the results of his research in the British journal Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society (MNRAS). "But there may be many others even further away, and the challenge is to capture them with gravitational distortion," he adds.
