There are many cool ways to get wind exoplanets , but obtain one because it was warping space - metre definitely ranks luxuriously on that list .

The major planet was set up in a system call   OGLE-2007 - BLG-349 about 8,000 light - year from Earth . It was first observed in 2007 , and now Hubble has confirmed that it is indeed a planet . What ’s more , it was find oneself to be orbiting two red-faced gnome stars about   11 million kilometer ( 7 million sea mile ) apart .

According to thestudy , accepted for publication in The Astronomical Journal , the planet ’s mass make the light of the headliner to be slenderly distort in a phenomenon known as a " microlensing event " . The event revealed a planet orbiting the star , but also the presence of a previously unknown second star .

“ The exoplanet was keep as a microlensing event in 2007 , " said lead writer David Bennett , from the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center , in astatement . " A detailed psychoanalysis revealed a third lensing physical structure in add-on to the star and major planet that were quite obvious from the data . "

The discovery was part of theOptical Gravitational Lensing Experiment(OGLE ) , a long - standing project that   has   investigated small gravitative distortions and their causes .

“ OGLE has detected over 17,000 microlensing outcome , but this is the first time such an event has been triggered by a circumbinary planetary system , ” explains   co - author Andrzej Udalski of   the University of Warsaw , Poland .

The most successful planet hunter to escort is the Kepler Space Telescope , which has discovered thousands of domain by carefully monitoring the Inner Light from stars and waiting for a satellite to lapse in front of it . Since Kepler can only observe the same star for a limited amount of clip , most of the exoplanets discovered like this have a very short orbital geological period .

This other method could provide a complementary glide slope to Kepler when it come to looking for planets further aside from their star .

“ This uncovering intimate we postulate to rethink our observing scheme when it comes to stellar binary lensing events , ” explains co - source Yiannis Tsapras of   the Astronomical Calculation Institute in Heidelberg , Germany . “ This is an exciting raw discovery for microlensing . ”