Invisible Planet in Warped Light
Original: "TESS's First Bound Microlensing Planet: A Binary Microlensing Event Revealing a Planetary Companion toward the Galactic Plane"
The TESS space telescope, originally designed to find transiting exoplanets, unexpectedly discovered a giant planet through gravitational microlensing.
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Every night, the TESS telescope scans the sky in 200-second exposures. One day in 2023, among millions of stars, it caught a rapid double flicker—like a distant lantern blinking twice as an invisible bird flew past. Thus was discovered a giant planet, betrayed by warped light. Now, such 'gravitational birds' may become a prime quarry for future observatories.
🎯 TESS's 200-second cadence is roughly 70 times higher than the typical cadence of ground-based microlensing surveys (one data point per night), allowing a detailed tracing of the caustic peak shapes, each lasting only about 5 hours.
\theta_E = \sqrt{\frac{4GM_L}{c^2} \frac{D_S - D_L}{D_S D_L}}
Characteristic angular scale of a gravitational lens: the more massive the lens and the closer it is to the line of sight, the larger the Einstein ring.
Scientists
Alan GuthAndrei LindeGeorges LemaîtreJames PeeblesAdam RiessBrian Schmidtexoplanet
gravitational lensing
galaxy
Hubble Space Telescope
transit method
spectroscopy
big bang
dark matterLaws
Friedmann equationsHubble's lawDoppler effectgravitational lensingKepler's third lawEinstein field equations