NASA has announced the possibility of the first confirmed planet located outside of the Milky Way galaxy. Astronomers using NASA’s space-based telescope Chandra X-ray Observatory identified a potential exoplanet in spiral galaxy Messier 51 (M51), also known as the Whirlpool Galaxy. Exoplanets are planets outside of the solar system, but all previously confirmed and possible exoplanets discovered to date were based in the Milky Way and were mostly less than about 3,000 light-years from Earth. The exoplanet in M51 is believed to be approximately 28 million light-years away. In a study published in Nature Astronomy, astronomers detected the presence of the hitherto unknown exoplanet by its transit, which occurs when the passage of a planet in front of a star obscures some of the star’s light to create a distinctive dip. The possible exoplanet’s transit lasted three hours, but astronomers observed it also has a large orbit and a rapid …