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Article: Cosmic discovery may swell harvest for planet hunters; Astronomers say they've found a planet around a double-star system, byusing other galaxies as telescopes.(USA)(Science)
- Article from:
- The Christian Science Monitor
- Article date:
- November 4, 1999
- Author:
CopyrightCOPYRIGHT 1999 The Christian Science Publishing Society. This material is published under license from the publisher through the Gale Group, Farmington Hills, Michigan. All inquiries regarding rights should be directed to the Gale Group. (Hide copyright information)
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Scientists hunting alien planets have a new string for their bows. For the first time, the ability of an object's gravity to act like a lens has revealed another world, some three times more massive than Jupiter.
Hunters have identified nearly two-dozen planets by studying the wobbles they impose on the motion of their parent stars toward and away from Earth. Now gravitational lensing - an effect Einstein predicted - gives them another way to locate their quarry.
Moreover, the new planet is the first ever found orbiting two stars. That's a bonus for members of the Microlensing Planet Search (MPS) team, who had expected their technique to reveal ...