Lens method finds far-off world

BBC NEWS: "An international team of astronomers has found a planet which, at about 15,000 light-years from Earth, is one of the most distant yet detected. The new world was discovered when its parent star's gravity distorted the light from an even more distant star. The way the distant star's light changed betrayed the planet's presence. Two amateur astronomers in New Zealand helped find the world using 'backyard' telescopes, showing that almost anyone can become a planet hunter. The newly discovered world is several times the mass of Jupiter, but astronomers say the microlensing technique used to find the planet worked so well that it could be used to find much smaller, Earth-sized planets."