NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope has teamed up with a telescope on the ground to find a remote gas planet about 13,000 light-years away, making it one of the most distant planets known.
The discovery demonstrates that Spitzer – from its unique perch in space – can be used to help solve the puzzle of how planets are distributed throughout our flat, spiral-shaped Milky Way galaxy. Are they concentrated heavily in its central hub, or more evenly spread throughout its suburbs?
This artist’s conception shows a planet half as massive as Jupiter located 13,000 light-years from Earth. It was detected by the Optical Gravitational Lensing Experiment and NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope using microlensing. Spitzer provided parallax measurements that allowed scientists to determine how far away the planet is.
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