Weekly - NASA finds fastest exoplanet ever and more
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NASA finds fastest exoplanet ever
NASA recently discovered a hypervelocity star, an extremely rare star that travels at incredible speeds through the galaxy. For the 1st time, such a star was spotted with an exoplanet being dragged along with it. This makes the Neptune-sized exoplanet located 24,000 lightyears from Earth, the fastest exoplanet ever discovered. It goes faster than 600 km per second along with its star - enough to escape the Milky Way.
Euclid finds nearly perfect Einstein ring
Einstein rings are formed when a large galaxy’s gravity bends the light coming from distant objects behind it, creating a large ring of light, visible at just the right angle. They also act as giant magnifying glasses due to a phenomenon called ‘gravitational lensing’. The Euclid telescope recently discovered such an Einstein ring 590 million light-years away from Earth. Einstein rings are very rare, only visible in 1% of galaxies. Nearly perfect ones like the one discovered by Euclid are even rarer, helping us to see parts of the galaxy, we couldn’t before.