Scientists Discover The First Planets Outside The Milky Way

The truth is out there. And past that is a cluster of planets 3.8 billion light-years away, a recent discovery that if confirmed could extend the boundary of what we know about the universe.

Using data from a NASA X-ray laboratory in space, Xinyu Dai, an astrophysicist and professor at the University of Oklahoma, detected, for the first time ever, a population of planets beyond the Milky Way galaxy. The mass of the planets range in size from Earth's moon to the massive Jupiter, our solar system's biggest planet.

There are few methods to determine the existence of distant planets. They are so far away that no telescope can observe them, Dai told The Washington Post. So Dai and his postdoctoral researcher Eduardo Guerras relied on a scientific principle to make the discovery: Albert Einstein's Theory of Relativity.