The images captured by NASA's Spitzer space telescope are used to detect exoplanets. Normally, these findings are produced by observing how the brightness of a star varies when an object passes in front of it, but scientists can also look at the effects that gravity produces on light. That's because, as Einstein predicted, the presence of a cosmic body causes light rays to curve around it.
Thanks to this phenomenon, known as gravitational lens, a team of astronomers has discovered a massive object in the center of the Milky Way. As reflected in a study still pending publication but collected in a digital repository, the body has been named OGLE-2016-BLG-1190Lb, has about 13 times the mass of Jupiter and orbits a star 22,000 light years away in the busy center of the Milky Way.
Although its exact nature has not yet been determined, it could be a brown dwarf, a star unable to shine because it is not massive enough. However, it is not entirely clear because the body is abnormally close to the true star that surrounds - about 5 AU or 750 million kilometers - right on the inner boundary of the area usually occupied by brown dwarfs. For this reason there is the possibility that OGLE is a planet of especially large proportions.
If the body were a brown dwarf, its location on the edge of what is known as the desert of brown dwarfs-that area near the star that orbits where they never meet-would make it especially interesting to study how cosmic objects become in stars.
However, the technique of detecting spatial bodies through the distortion of light is still in its infancy and, for the time being, it provides few details about those objects that it sees. Their refinement could help experts study the relationships between the stars and the family members that orbit them.
No comments:
Post a Comment