Subscribers warp my spacetime

If everything feels like it’s all going downhill today, there may be an astronomical reason for that: Today, July 6, 2026 is when Earth reaches aphelion^* , the farthest point from the sun on our planet’s slightly elliptical orbit. This happens at 13:30 Eastern (US) time, or 17:30 UT. Astronomers tend to measure distances using the centers of objects (the math works out best that way), and at that time the centers of Earth and the sun will be 152,087,774.4 km apart.

I got this number from the wonderful Astronomical Almanac site maintained by the US Naval Observatory; you can give it a body and a time and it will tell you all sorts of cool info. The distance page is here. Note it gives the answer in AU, or astronomical units, which is the average distance of Earth from the sun, defined as 149,597,870.7 km. So Earth will be 1.016643978 AU from the sun at that time, which you can see from the number itself is about 1.7% more than average.

As an astronomer I don’t generally celebrate aphelion, but as a newsletter writer why not use it as an excuse to have a subscription sale? So I will!

Starting today and running through Friday at noon (Eastern US time), annual premium subscriptions to this newsletter are discounted 25%, so they’re just $45 per year. Premium subscribers get three issues per week (on Monday, Tuesday, and Thursday), no ads, and can also leave comments for any issue archived on the newsletter website.

This discount applies to all new subscriptions, or upgrades from free or monthly subscriptions (if you’re currently a monthly subscriber this’ll save you 27 bucks a year). Just go to the sign-up page, enter your email, and choose the annual option (if you’re giving this as a gift to someone, click the “gift” button just above that as well).

This discount will apply for one year, so when your subscription period is up it’ll revert back to the regular price.

CLICK HERE TO SIGN UP

Thanks! And enjoy the rest of the orbit!

^* Pronounced ap-hee-lee-un, though I’ve sometimes seen it pronounced as aff-hee-lee-un, which I think is silly. The prefix is from apo meaning “away from” and the root word is helion for sun. So I think the keeping the hard p sound makes more sense, unless you’re some kind of meathead, pronounced mee-thed.

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TESS, the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite, was designed to find exoplanets orbiting nearby, bright stars. If we see the planet’s orbit edge-on, then once per orbit it partially eclipses the star, causing it to dim and brighten in a specific way. As of late May, 2026, TESS has found nearly 900 confirmed planets, and has over 8,000 candidates still to be confirmed. Impressive.

But a new planet was recently confirmed using TESS, but not at all in the usual way. This time, it was found via gravitational lensing.

This is an effect predicted by Einstein’s Theory of Relativity and confirmed. I’ve written about it oh so many times before: a massive object (called the lens) has gravity, which bends space. A photon from some object (called the source) behind the first one traveling through that space will follow the bend, like a car following a dip in a road. This has many possible effects: it can create multiple images of the source, or distort its image (if it’s, say, a galaxy), or magnify the image. It also, crucially, makes the source appear brighter, since photons that might otherwise miss us are focused toward us. It’s like piping rain into a bucket; the bucket fills faster.

This works for stars and even planets! Say a star that hosts a planet (the lensing system) is some distance away from Earth. If this system passes directly in front of a more distant star (the source) as seen from Earth, then the source star will appear to brighten in a characteristic way. It will even brighten twice; once due to the star’s gravity and another time due to the planet’s.

Mind you, the planet is far, far too faint to detect otherwise. It only reveals itself through its gravity.

Well! In April 2023 the ESA Gaia mission reported a star getting brighter (which was part of its mission, detecting the brightness of over a billion stars). Given the designation Gaia23bra, it doubled in brightness very rapidly, in about a day. Interested, some astronomers dug into the TESS data archives, and found the star had been seen by that spacecraft as well [link to journal paper]. TESS observed the star every two minutes, which is a rapid enough cadence to really nail down the light curve, how the star brightened over time. Feeding that data into a well-tested set of programs that model gravitational lenses, they found the clear signature of a planet and star as the lens.

The source star is smaller and cooler than the sun, with about 90% the sun’s mass. It’s about 42,000 light-years away, which is nearly halfway across the galaxy! 

The lensing star is smaller yet, about 80% the sun’s mass. The planet, called Gaia23bra b, is about 1.6 times the mass of Jupiter, so roughly the same size as our solar system’s biggest planet. It orbits its host star at a distance of about 740 million kilometers, which is similar to Jupiter’s distance from the sun, too.

Unsurprisingly, the star is located in the plane of our Milky Way. For this geometry to work, two stars have to pass extremely close together in the sky, so the chances of that go way up where there are lots more stars. Looking into the disk of the galaxy means looking through billions of stars (the only place where stars are denser is in the galactic core, which is where most gravitationally lensing planets have been found).

Interestingly, one of the main goals of the soon-to-be-launched Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope is to look for gravitational lenses like this (technically called microlensing, since the more general term is reserved for when big objects like galaxies do the lensing). It will scan every 12 minutes or so for such events, slower than TESS does, so it may miss details in the light curve, but will get much more accurate brightnesses for the stars involved. So, together, Roman and TESS could make a mighty team for this sort of thing. 

At the moment, by far the majority of exoplanets found have used the transit method (the mini-eclipse way). Only a handful has been found by lensing, but that number should go way up soon. Roman is predicted to find hundreds of planets this way looking toward the Milky Way’s center. That’s extremely cool! It is due to launch in the fall, so we may be on the verge of a new explosion in exoplanet discoveries. Stay Tuned!

You can email me at [email protected] (though replies can take a while), and all my social media outlets are gathered together at about.me. Also, if you don’t already, please subscribe to this newsletter! And feel free to tell a friend or nine, too. Thanks!