The data with which the planet was discovered was collected by the Kepler telescope two years before his retirement. It is the farthest planet ever discovered, twice as far away from the previous record.
The researchers published their findings in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.
Dr. Eamon Kerins, Principal Investigator, Science and Technology Facility Council (STFC) grant funded the research. He said this discovery is notable because the Kepler telescope was not intended to use microlensing to detect planets.
Exoplanets located far away from Earth can be detected using gravitational microlensing. Researchers studied Kepler’s data from April to July 2016. Then the spacecraft was monitoring millions of stars through microlensing.
The US space agency NASA will deploy the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope at the end of this decade. This telescope can use microlensing technology to search for thousands of such planets, which are located very far from Earth. The Euclid mission of the European Space Agency can also search for exoplanets through microlensing. It is going to launch next year. It is expected that in the coming time, the world will also come to know about more such planets, which are far away from us, but are similar to the planets of our solar system.