Flickers From Far-Off Planets

ASTRONOMYAn unusual collaboration of telescopes spaced around the Southern Hemisphere has uncovered two strong candidates for planets circling stars thousands of light-years from Earth. The telescopes made the detections by monitoring stars in the Milky Way's crowded central bulge for gravitational lensing: apparent brightenings that could indicate another, dimmer star with a retinue of planets drifting across the line of sight.