RUGBY: Known formally as “OGLE-2014-BLG-0124Lb,” the gas giant was detected by NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope and the OGLE Warsaw Telescope at the Las Campanas Observatory in Chile. It’s about half as massive as Jupiter and is about 13,000 light-years from Earth.
“For context, most of the planets we do know about are a factor of 10-100 times closer than OGLE-2014-BLG-0124,” Dr. Jennifer Yee, a NASA Sagan Fellow at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge, Mass., and lead author of a paper describing the planet, told The Huffington Post in an email.
A distant world. Astronomers discovered the planet by exploiting a curious phenomenon known as “microlensing,” in which gravity from one star shifts the light emitted by a more distant one — like a sort of cosmic magnifying glass.
If a planet is orbiting the nearer star, it can cause a “blip” in the magnification. Astronomers can use these blips to characterize and mark the distance of planets tens of thousands of light-years away, just like OGLE-2014-BLG-0124Lb.
Tesla driverless system to use updated radar technology
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