Once found, the microlensing measurements would help in determining a number of properties, such as the planet’s mass and distance, how it sits in relation to its star, and its galactic position. In ...

Astronomers have, for the first time, found a planet orbiting a binary star system using microlensing. Gravitational lensing is a technique that made its name by aiding in the discovery of galaxies.

One of the closest galaxies to the Milky Way almost got away with theft. However, new simulations convicted the Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC) of stealing stars from its neighbor, the Small Magellanic ...

Gravitational microlensing is a transient but powerful phenomenon that occurs when a foreground mass – such as a star or a planetary system – temporarily magnifies the light from a more distant ...

In exoplanet hunting today, there seems to be one burning question that nearly every new article published asks: Where did these planets come from? Subscribe to read this story ad-free Get unlimited ...

NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope and the W. M. Keck Observatory in Hawaii have made independent confirmations of an exoplanet orbiting far from its central star. The planet was discovered through a ...

The abundance of low-mass compact objects, at or below the hydrogen-burning mass limit of 0.08M ⊙ (where M ⊙ is the solar mass), remains an open question. This abundance has implications for such ...

Some galaxies pump out vast amounts of energy from a very small volume of space, typically not much bigger than our own solar system. The cores of these galaxies, so called Active Galactic Nuclei or ...