OGLE-2005-BLG-071Lb is a

planet A planet is a large, Hydrostatic equilibrium, rounded Astronomical object, astronomical body that is generally required to be in orbit around a star, stellar remnant, or brown dwarf, and is not one itself. The Solar System has eight planets b ...

discovered by the

Optical Gravitational Lensing Experiment The Optical Gravitational Lensing Experiment (OGLE) is a Polish astronomy, astronomical project based at the University of Warsaw that runs time-domain astronomy, a long-term variability sky survey (1992–present). The main goals are the detecti ...

(OGLE) and others in 2005, using

gravitational microlensing Gravitational microlensing is an astronomical phenomenon caused by the gravitational lens effect. It can be used to detect objects that range from the mass of a planet to the mass of a star, regardless of the light they emit. Typically, astronom ...

. According to the best fit model, it has about 3.5 times the mass of

Jupiter Jupiter is the fifth planet from the Sun and the List of Solar System objects by size, largest in the Solar System. It is a gas giant with a Jupiter mass, mass more than 2.5 times that of all the other planets in the Solar System combined a ...

and a

projected separation This glossary of astronomy is a list of definitions of terms and concepts relevant to astronomy and cosmology, their sub-disciplines, and related fields. Astronomy is concerned with the study of celestial objects and phenomena that originate outs ...

of 3.6

astronomical unit The astronomical unit (symbol: au or AU) is a unit of length defined to be exactly equal to . Historically, the astronomical unit was conceived as the average Earth-Sun distance (the average of Earth's aphelion and perihelion), before its m ...

s from the star. This would result in an effective temperature around 50 K, similar to that of

Neptune Neptune is the eighth and farthest known planet from the Sun. It is the List of Solar System objects by size, fourth-largest planet in the Solar System by diameter, the third-most-massive planet, and the densest giant planet. It is 17 t ...

. However, an alternative model which gives a slightly lower mass of 3.3 times that of Jupiter and a projected separation of 2.1 AU is only slightly less likely. It may be the most massive planet currently known around a red dwarf star (though only lower limits are known for those planets detected by the

radial velocity method Doppler spectroscopy (also known as the radial-velocity method, or colloquially, the wobble method) is an indirect method for finding extrasolar planets and brown dwarfs from radial-velocity measurements via observation of Doppler shifts in th ...

References

Exoplanets discovered in 2005 Giant planets Scorpius Exoplanets detected by microlensing {{extrasolar-planet-stub

See also

References