The European astronomers who are studying the Milky Way have discovered the first exoplanet originating from a different galaxy than ours, orbiting a distant star, being at the end of its life cycle.
This exogalactic planet, called HIP 13044b, has a mass of 1.5 times that of Jupiter – the largest planet in our solar system.
The planet revolves around the star HIP 13044, located at a distance of 2,200 light years from Earth in the southern constellation Fornax.
This star was originally part of a stellar group that belonged to a dwarf galaxy that was “devoured” by the Milky Way, an act of “galactic cannibalism” spent nine billion years ago.
The planet orbits at small distance by its star and therefore it’s very hot. In the closest point of its elliptical orbit, this planet is 10 times closer by its star than the distance between Earth and the Sun, said the authors of this discovery, whose research was published in the Science magazine. The planet makes a complete revolution around its star in 16.2 days.
“This discovery is very exciting,” said Rainer Klement, an astrophysicist at the Max Planck Institute in Germany, co-author of the study. “For the first time, astronomers have detected a planetary system in a stellar stream of extragalactic origin. Because of the great distances involved, there are no confirmed detections of planets in other galaxies. But this cosmic merger has brought an extragalactic planet within our reach.”
The discovery was made by Austral Telescope Observatory (ESO), located in the area of La Silla in Chile, at an altitude of 2,400 meters.
