- MarsShadow
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- Noble Legendary Member
HIP 13044 - The extra-galactic exoplanet!
Some extrasolar planets truly are from out of this world.. For the first time, astronomers have discovered a planet in the Milky Way that's believed to have came from another galaxy. The planet orbits an elderly star that was ripped from a small satellite galaxy some 6-9 billion years ago.
HIP 13044 is about 2,000 light years from Earth in the constellation Formax and is a part of a stream of stars called Helmi that are believed to have originated in another galaxy apart from our own. HIP 13044 and other stars in the Helmi stream stand out in the solar neighborhood because they have elongated orbits that take them about 42,000 light-years above and below the plane of the Milky Way's disk. Such orbits strongly suggest that the stars were once a part of a group that was torn from another smaller galaxy and were stretched out by gravitational tidal forces into a filament or stream, fusing the smaller galaxy with our own. The stars motion has been monitored for many months, looking for telltale orbital wobbles that would indicate the presence of a tiny, unseen orbiting planet.