First planet outside our galaxy?

摘要

IN A galaxy far, far away, a huge planet may be orbiting a binary star system. If this world is real, it would be the most distant ever spotted - the first planet to be found in another galaxy. A team of researchers led by Rosanne Di Stefano at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Massachusetts spotted this potential planet, now named M51-ULS-1b. It resides in a galaxy called M51, known as the Whirlpool galaxy, which is 28 million light years away. The researchers found the planet by hunting through data from 2624 observations made by the Chandra X-ray Observatory space telescope.