Beyond Our Galaxy

Using information from NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory and a planet detection technique called microlensing to study a distant quasar galaxy , scientists at the University of Oklahoma found evidence that there are approximately 2,000 extragalactic planets for every one star beyond the Milky Way. The planet population, ranging from the size of the Moon to the size of Jupiter, were spotted in a galaxy located 3.8 billion light years away, according to the study published in The Astrophysical Journal. "We are very excited about this discovery," says Xinyu Dai, lead researcher on the study. "We can estimate that the number of planets in this [faraway] galaxy is more than a trillion," says Xinyu Dai, the astronomy and astrophysics professor who led the study. The paper, titled “Probing Planets in Extragalactic Galaxies Using Quasar Microlensing,” appeared in the Astrophysical Journal Letters. We analyzed the high frequency of the signature by modeling the data to determine the mass.”

Dai made the discovery with Postdoctoral Researcher Eduardo Guerras – their research has been published in The Astrophysical Journal Letters. The moon, which is orbiting the star Kepler-1625, is approximately 4,000 light years away,

Also last year, scientists used data from NASA’s Kepler space telescope and machine learning technology from Google to discover a new planet outside of our solar system. “This galaxy is located 3.8 billion light years away, and there is not the slightest chance of observing these planets directly, not even with the best telescope one can imagine in a science fiction scenario,” Guerras said.
Scientists using data from the Chandra X-ray Observatory discover new exoplanets in galaxies beyond the Milky Way for the first time.