And the OGLE-201 candidate is likely zooming through deep space all by its lonesome. The team's calculations suggest that the lensing body has a mass between that of Mars and Earth, and is probably closer in heft to the Red Planet than to our own world. "When we first spotted this event, it was clear that it must have been caused by an extremely tiny object," co-author Radoslaw Poleski, of the Astronomical Observatory of the University of Warsaw, said in the same statement. The team further characterized the event using data collected by the Korea Microlensing Telescope Network, which operates telescopes in Chile, Australia and South Africa. The researchers pulled a very interesting signal out of the OGLE observations - an event called OGLE-201, which at 42 minutes long is the shortest microlensing event ever detected. This project, led by the University of Warsaw in Poland, uses a 1.3-meter telescope at Las Campanas Observatory in Chile to monitor millions of stars near the Milky Way's center on every clear night. In the new study, for example, Mroz and his colleagues analyzed data gathered by OGLE. But planet hunters such as Mroz don't observe the heavens one star at a time.
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