The possible earth sized planet in the foreground galaxy of Q0957+561 is the farthest of all detected extrasolar worlds. And because of the unusual method used to detect it, we know virtually nothing about this planet, and probably will not get another chance to find out. Q0957+561 is a quazar whose image is gravitationally lensed by a galaxy which lies directly in the line of sight between it and our own world. The foreground galaxy splits the quazar's image into two lobes, labeled A and B. The properties of this gravitational lens is that if both lobes fluctuate in some way, then the fluctuation is occuring in the quazar. If the fluctuation occurs only in one of the lobes, however, the fluctuation is due to the forground galaxy. What astronomers discovered was a minute fluctuation in the A lobe, but no corrosponding fluctuation in the B lobe. The fluctuation was consistant with what is expected if a planet in the foreground galaxy passed in front of the quazar. The magnitude and duration of the fluctuation indicates that the planet is only a few times the mass of the earth. Unfortunately that's all we know. We have no idea if the planet orbits a star, what kind of star it may be, or what kind of an orbit the planet is in. All we know is the galaxy and the mass. Given this near total lack of knowledge, we cannot even begin to speculate about this world.
View a VRML model of the system. Please be patient while the file downloads. For a VRML tour of our galaxy's exoplanets, check out Extrasolar VR.
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