The massive planet was found usiing the gravitational microlensing technique at the Mount John Observatory in New Zealand.
(Microlensing Observations in Astrophysics)
Deep inside the Milky Way’s galactic bulge, a world is orbiting a star — a world that is one-third the size of our own sun and 25,000 light-years away from us.
Astronomers working in three locations — New Zealand, Poland and Israel — all sighted it using using a quirk of Einstein’s general relativity theory to detect it:
Microlensing events occur when a star passes in front of another more distant star. As the nearer star passes in front, its gravitational field — which is (according to general relativity) bending the surrounding spacetime — deflects the light from the more distant star. Like the lens in a magnifying glass, the starlight is magnified and Earth-bound observatories are able to spot a transient brightening. Information about the “lens” (the foreground star) and any planets in tow can then be deduced.
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Artist rendering of planetary discoveries by NASA’s Kepler spacecraft. (NASA/W. Stenzel)