Scientists discover earth's 'iceball twin' and it is 13,000 light years away

The National Aeronautics Space Administration continues its venture into the unknown and has discovered yet another planet similar to ours. The exoplanet, situated nearly 13,000 light-years away, is about as massive as Earth and orbits its star at about the same distance Earth circles the sun. Whereas radial velocity searches look for planets in our immediate galactic neighborhood, up to 100 light years from Earth, and transit photometry can potentially detect planets at a distance of hundreds of light-years, microlensing can find planets orbiting stars near the center of the galaxy, thousands of light-years away. Microlensing is a technique that facilitates the discovery of distant objects by using background stars as flashlights When a star crosses precisely in front of a bright star in the background, the gravity of the foreground star focuses the light of the background star, making it appear brighter The closer object's gravity bends and magnifies the background star's light, acting like a lens A planet orbiting the foreground object may cause an additional blip in the star's brightness. In this case, the blip only lasted a few hours Representational Image Representational Image This technique has found the most distant known exoplanets from Earth, and can detect low-mass planets that are substantially farther from their stars than Earth is from our sun The newly discovered planet also aids scientists in their quest to figure out the distribution of planets in our galaxy.