Astronomers Find Jupiter’s Identical Twin Exoplanet 17,000 Light-Years Away Using Kepler Space Telescope

Using data from the decommissioned Kepler Space Telescope, an international team of astronomers discovered a new planet that is very similar to Jupiter but is over 17,000 light-years distant.

The planet, known as K2-2016-BLG-0005Lb, was identified after going through Kepler data from 2016. It has almost the same mass as Jupiter and is around the same distance from its star as Jupiter is from the sun. As a result, it's considered a "close Jupiter analog."

The preprint of "Kepler K2 Campaign 9: II. First space-based discovery of an exoplanet using microlensing" is accessible on arXiv.

Astronomers Find Jupiter-Like Exoplanet Using Kepler Telescope

The researchers were looking at data from the Kepler K2 mission from 2016, especially data from Campaign 9. According to the latest study, a new search technique identified five possible microlensing signals from the dataset (as reported in a 2021 research), one of which was deemed a "clear" microlensing event near the galactic bulge.

Five ground-based surveys, namely the Optical Gravitational Lensing Experiment (OGLE-IV), the Canada-France-Hawaii Telescope (CFHT), Microlensing Observations in Astrophysics (MOA-2), the Korean Microlensing Telescope Network (KMTNet), and the United Kingdom InfraRed Telescope, scan the same location in space simultaneously (UKIRT).

Researchers told Gizmodo that they used the data from these observatories to confirm the Kepler findings and further characterize the Jupiter-like planet. The authors note that while these campaigns looked in the correct place at the appropriate time, "none of the ground-based surveys highlighted K2-2016-BLG-0005 in advance" of the 2021 research.

Earth is 17,000 light-years away from the newly discovered exoplanet. It has almost the same mass as Jupiter and follows a comparable orbit around its host star. According to astronomers, this planet is "one of the closest relatives to Jupiter that has yet to be discovered by any means.

"To see the effect at all requires almost perfect alignment between the foreground planetary system and a background star," explained Dr. Eamonn Kerins, Principal Investigator for the Science and Technology Facilities Council (STFC) grant that funded the work, in a statement.

"The chance that a background star is affected this way by a planet is tens to hundreds of millions to one against. But there are hundreds of millions of stars towards the center of our Galaxy. So Kepler just sat and watched them for three months."

How Astronomers Could Further Deepen Study

The exoplanet is also about twice as far from us as the next farthest of the hundreds of planets discovered by Kepler. Astronomers have been able to substantially extend Kepler's reach by utilizing the new technology.

Remarkably, Kepler data might be used to locate a planet because Kepler was meant to find planets primarily using a different approach called the transit method. It keeps an eye out for minor dips in the brightness of a star produced by a planet passing between us and it. Kepler found around 2,600 exoplanets in this method during its time on the planet, Digital Trends reported.

Although Kepler is no longer active, NASA's forthcoming Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope, which is set to launch later this decade, is being designed precisely to use microlensing to locate planets. Kerins hopes that the Roman telescope will disclose, among other things, the planetary structures of distant star systems and the quantity of possibly habitable worlds in the Milky Way.

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