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An international research team led by UTSA associate professor of astrophysics Thayne Currie has made a breakthrough in accelerating the search for new planets.In a paper slated for publication April 14 in Science, Currie reports the first exoplanet jointly discovered through direct imaging and precision astrometry, a new indirect method that identifies a planet by measuring the position of the star it orbits. Data from the Subaru Telescope in Hawaii and space telescopes from the European Space Agency (ESA) were integral to the team’s discovery...By contrast, indirect planet detection methods determine a planet's existence through its effect on the star...

A recent report threw light on the existence of Fomalhaut b, the exoplanet. It was in 2008 that NASA had claimed to have spotted a bright object in a gap in the disc of a planet, which was then claimed to be the first exoplanet. However, things changed later when they could not spot the same using other telescopes, including Hubble's infrared cousin Spitzer, and they asserted it to be a mass of wandering dust. Apparently, it was when Thayne Currie, an astronomer at the University of Toronto, decided to explore it further, that they administered new analytic techniques to...