Day 1759

Monday.  Tuesday.

2009.08987

M51-ULS-1b: the first candidate for a planet in an external galaxy

Di Stefano, et al

Do external galaxies host planetary systems? Many lines of reasoning suggest that the answer must be 'yes'. In the foreseeable future, however, the question cannot be answered by the methods most successful in our own Galaxy. We report on a different approach which focuses on bright X-ray sources (XRSs). M51-ULS-1b is the first planet candidate to be found because it produces a full, short-lived eclipse of a bright XRS. M51-ULS-1b has a most probable radius slightly smaller than Saturn. It orbits one of the brightest XRSs in the external galaxy M51, the Whirlpool Galaxy, located 8.6 Megaparsecs from Earth. It is the first candidate for a planet in an external galaxy. The binary it orbits, M51-ULS-1, is young and massive. One of the binary components is a stellar remnant, either a neutron star (NS) or black hole (BH), and the other is a massive star. X-ray transits can now be used to discover more planets in external galaxies and also planets orbiting XRSs inside the Milky Way.

2009.09512

Transfer of life between Earth and Venus with planet-grazing asteroids

Siraj, Loeb

Recently, phosphine was discovered in the atmosphere of Venus as a potential biosignature. This raises the question: if Venusian life exists, could it be related to terrestrial life? Based on the known rate of meteoroid impacts on Earth, we show that at least $\sim 6 \times 10^5$ asteroids have grazed Earth's atmosphere without being significantly heated and later impacted Venus, and a similar number have grazed Venus's atmosphere and later impacted the Earth, both within a period of $\sim 10^5$ years during which microbes could survive in space. Although the abundance of terrestrial life in the upper atmosphere is unknown, these planet-grazing shepherds could have potentially been capable of transferring microbial life between the atmospheres of Earth and Venus. As a result, the origin of possible Venusian life may be fundamentally indistinguishable from that of terrestrial life.

2009.10067

The first shear measurements from precision weak lensing

Gurri, Taylor, Fluke

We present an end-to-end methodology to measure the effects of weak lensing on individual galaxy-galaxy systems exploiting their kinematic information. Using this methodology, we have measured a shear signal from the velocity fields of 18 weakly-lensed galaxies. We selected a sample of systems based only on the properties of the sources, requiring them to be bright (apparent $i$-band magnitude $ < 17.4$) and in the nearby Universe ($z < 0.15$). We have observed the velocity fields of the sources with WiFeS, an optical IFU on a 2.3m telescope, and fitted them using a simple circular motion model with an external shear. We have measured an average shear of $\langle \gamma \rangle = 0.020 \pm 0.008$ compared to a predicted $\langle \gamma_{pred} \rangle = 0.005$ obtained using median stellar-to-halo relationships from the literature. While still a statistical approach, our results suggest that this new weak lensing methodology can overcome some of the limitations of traditional stacking-based techniques. We describe in detail all the steps of the methodology and make publicly available all the velocity maps for the weakly-lensed sources used in this study.