Just found: The planet from another galaxy
While some 500 planets have been identified in other parts of our galaxy - the Milky Way - none has been reported in other galaxies.
Now one has been discovered orbiting a star called HIP 13044, located about 2,000 light year away. While this star is now in the Milky Way, researchers reported in Thursday's online edition of the journal Science that it originated in a separate galaxy that was later cannibalized by ours.
That makes the new planet, which is about 20 percent larger than Jupiter, the first found to have originated in another galaxy.
"This discovery is very exciting," Rainer Klement of Germany's Max Planck Institute for Astronomy, said in a statement.
"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 new planet is orbiting a star from what is known as the Helmi stream - a group of stars that originally belonged to a dwarf galaxy that was devoured by the Milky Way about six to nine billion years ago.
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