Just spoke with @LBC about the discovery of what might be a planet in another galaxy: bbc.com/news/science-e…
Which is very exciting! But (and I didn't get to this in the interview) there are reasons to be skeptical about this claim.
Which is very exciting! But (and I didn't get to this in the interview) there are reasons to be skeptical about this claim.
The astronomers observed a dip in the bright x-ray light from a binary system consisting of a massive star locked in an orbit with a compact stellar remnant: a black hole or neutron star. The claim is a planet passed in front of the system and briefly blocked the x-ray emission.
Such a "transit" event is certainly plausible -- we've detected thousands of exoplanets via transits in our own galaxy! But this case would be a VERY lucky situation. The alignment would have to be perfect and the timing EXTREMELY lucky to have caught it.
Some of my exoplanet-expert colleagues (eg. @JontiHorner, @fringetracker, @exohugh) have expressed skepticism about the claim. To say for sure, we'd have to observe the source again in 70 yrs. But the technique could find more systems like this, so, exciting prospects either way!
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