First exoplanet detected by gravitational microlensing
Primer exoplaneta detectado por microlente gravitacional
- Date
- 2003 (publicado en 2004) · confidence high
- Place
- Mount John Observatory, Lake Tekapo, New Zealand
- Credited to
- MOA and OGLE collaborations (Ian Bond and colleagues)
- Field
- Cosmos & Earth
What was discovered
The 2003 microlensing event of a Milky Way star showed a variation caused by a planet of about 2.6 Jupiter masses. It was the first exoplanet detected by this method, with the MOA telescope in New Zealand and OGLE data.
Event OGLE-2003-BLG-235 / MOA-2003-BLG-53 was published in 2004. Its planet is a gas giant at about 5 kpc.
What it led to
- searches for low-mass exoplanets by microlensing
- estimates of the frequency of planets beyond the ice line
- microlensing missions from space (Roman)