Welcome to brain Stuff, a production of I Heart Radio. Hey brain Stuff Lauren bol Obam here for those interested in space science or even science fiction. Astronomers have been full of fascinating news in the past few years. As technology improves, researchers have been able to discover even more celestial objects than we ever imagined, from comets and asteroids zipping through our Solar System to dark matter and planets orbiting distant stars. Now we have evidence of planets far
beyond those we've ever discovered before. But all the planets we found through our advanced technology have been within our own Milky Way Galaxy until now. That is. In a paper published in October one in the journal Nature Astronomy, a team of astronomers and astrophysicists has put forth a new planetary candidate farther away than we've ever seen before. It's called Catcheley M fifty one U L S one B and is located in Messier fifty one, also called
the Whirlpool Galaxy. While humans might never see or even confirm the existence of this potential planet, even its theoretical reality paves the way for more discoveries and the deep reaches of space beyond anything yet discovered. So let's talk about how we find planets. Four decades researchers have used data from Earth based and orbital telescopes to find planets beyond those in our Solar system, called exoplanets. Typically, researchers look for a transit event, which is when the planet's
orbit takes it in front of its star. From our perspective, transits occur in our Solar system too. You might recall one of the most recent transits that occurred in twenty nineteen when tiny Mercury passed in front of the Sun. Depending on the size of the planet relative to the star, a transit event will cause the star's brightness too dim, even when the star doesn't emit light along the visible wavelength. That's why the Chandra X ray observatory was used to
discover this new planetary candidate. In many cases, researchers are able to observe the star dimming and surmise that a planet must be orbiting that star or stars, as there are circumbinary planets that orbit two stars. These planetary candidates are put forward to the scientific community to verify with additional data, and have resulted in more than four thousand confirmed exoplanets. Up until this point, though every proposed exo planet has been located within a small region of our
own galaxy, the Milky Way. What makes this new paper compelling is the proposal that the researchers have a planetary candidate outside the Milky Way. Way outside the Milky Way. According to their research, the potential planet is an estimated twenty million light years from Earth. They also proposed a new term for such planets, extra planets. The researchers chose
to look outside our galactic neighborhood for two reasons. For there's a better probability of discovering a planetary candidate using an X ray transit technique, since the binary stars that omit X rays are physically smaller and thus more likely to be fully obscured when one of their planets transits
across them. The second reason was practical. The team had access to use the Chandra X ray observatory at a time when the observatory was pointed at an area of space where there were lots of data points for the article. This episode is based on how Stuff Work spoke with Theoron Carmichael, one of the papers authors, speaking on behalf of the team. He explained the focus outside of the Milky Way was due to the number of X ray sources within the field of view of the Chandra observatory.
This made things more convenient to observe by allowing for a focus on one area of the sky and not having to point the telescope in very different locations in the sky. As of now, we're not aware of any new exo planet candidates that orbit X resources in the Milky Way. This technique is certainly applicable to X resources within the Milky Way, and perhaps now scientists will be
inspired to look when their turn comes up on Chandra. Unfortunately, due to this potential planet's tremendous distance from Earth and unique system composition, it's going to take a long time to verify whether it actually exists. The system has two stars, a neutron star or black hole astronomers aren't exactly sure which that's emitting the X rays observed to be dimming during the transit, and a companion star that's twenty times
the mass of our own son. The planetary candidate orbits both of those celestial objects, making it circumbinary, and it takes roughly seventy years to make that orbit, so the next time a transit might be visible would be several decades from now. Carmichael said, Since the next transit event is so uncertain, it could be as soon as decades from now or much longer. There aren't any plans in
place to take follow up observations of this particular planet candidate. Instead, new X ray observations and archival data of previous observations are more readily available to search for more planet candidates like this one. So while the existence of M fifty one u l S one B might never be verified, researchers plan to use it as inspiration to search for other planetary candidates like it, far beyond the bounds of
our galaxy and perhaps even within it. Today's episode is based on the article Researchers find first potential planet outside the Milky Way on how stuff works dot Com, written by Valerie Stymack. Brain Stuff is production by Heart Radio in partnership with how stuff works dot Com, and it is produced by Tyler Clang. Or more podcasts from my heart Radio, visit the i heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.