'Einstein's Planet' discovered with help of general relativity theory
Einstein's special relativity has proven more useful than ever, as scientists have now used it to discover an alien planet around another star.
The newfound world ― nicknamed "Einstein's planet" by astronomers who discovered it ― is the latest of more than 800 planets known to exist beyond the solar system, and the first to be found through this method.
The planet, officially known as Kepler-76b, is 25 percent larger than Jupiter and weighs about twice as much, putting it in a class known as "hot Jupiters." The world orbits a star located about 2,000 light-years from Earth in the constellation Cygnus.
The researchers capitalized on subtle effects predicted by Albert Einstein's special theory of relativity to find the planet.
The first is called the "beaming" effect, and occurs when light from the parent star brightens as its planet tugs it a nudge closer to Earth, and dims as the planet pulls it away.
Relativistic effects cause light particles, called photons, to pile up and become focused in the direction of the star's motion.
Additionally, gravitational tides from the orbiting planet caused its star to stretch slightly into a football shape, causing it to appear brighter when its wider side faces us, revealing more surface area.
Finally, the planet itself reflects a small amount of starlight, which also contributed to its discovery.
Team member David Latham of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge, Mass., said, "We needed high quality measurements of stellar brightness, accurate to a few parts per million."
The researchers used data from NASA's Kepler spacecraft, which provided the extremely detailed observations necessary. While Kepler was designed to hunt for alien planets, it normally does so using the transit method, which looks for stars that dim periodically as planets pass in front of them. A paper detailing the planet discovery will be published in an upcoming issue of The Astrophysical Journal.