Among the few things we know about space is that our galaxy is the Milky Way, there are a lot of planets out of the Solar System, and there are millions of other galaxies. It is very important to understand these things to comprehend what we are about to tell you.
NASA’s most recent discovery is beyond shocking. Though they have already found thousands of exoplanets, they believe they finally found the first sign of a planet in a whole other galaxy.
Exoplanets aren’t rare, they are planets outside of the Solar System that orbit another star different from the Sun, less than 3.000 light-years from Earth, but this one from the Whirlpool galaxy could be the first one ever found out from the Milky Way.
They explained on Monday, October 26th that they have got some strange signals from Whirlpool that would be over 28 million light-years from us thanks to the X-ray Chandra Observatory.
This kind of X-ray has a different wavelength that makes it possible to go further than other galaxies but until this discovery, they had been able to find only black holes and neutron stars that previously collapsed, because both of the celestial bodies emit detectable X-rays near them.
The X-ray regions are usually relatively small, which causes that when an exoplanet passes through it, it completely blocks the signal and this would help to detect them easily. The planet seems to be the size of Saturn.
Now there is a big question of how the planet got near the X-ray signal. NASA believes that the planet had to survive the explosion of a supernova that created the black hole or the neutron star. Either way, the nearby star could also explode and crash excessive amounts of radiation to the planet.
Still, the allegedly found outer galaxy exoplanet needs to be confirmed yet. It has a really big orbit and it won’t pass near the binary partner for at least 70 years, which means the investigation would last a few decades at best.
