By Ron Cowen
Some extrasolar planets are truly out of this world.
Astronomers have for the first time discovered a planet in the Milky Way that came from another galaxy. The planet, which has a mass of at least 1.25 Jupiters, orbits an elderly star that was ripped from a small satellite galaxy some 6 to 9 billion years ago.
Johny Setiawan and Rainer Klement of the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy in Heidelberg, Germany, describe the finding online November 18 in Science.
“The coolness factor is definitely that the planet and star came from another galaxy,” says Sara Seager of MIT, who was not part of the study. “The planet almost certainly formed during the time the star was in the other galaxy.”