Avi Loeb

Yeah, but it will be undetectable, he said.

Okay.

Then within 10 minutes, he comes to my office and says, Avi, you were right.

Actually, the effect goes like the square root of the mass ratio, not like the mass ratio.

Really?

Yeah, so it's much bigger.

It could be a few percent.

I would think it would be the inverse, like inverse square law, no?

No, no, no.

So the planet is located, like the earth, for example, is at a certain distance from the sun.

If you put that configuration,

halfway through the Milky Way galaxy, it's the ideal position for the planet to affect the light that is being lensed by the star.

That's the coincidence.

And then when the light passes near the planet of one of the lensed images,

It gets lensed by the planet.

But the question is, is the effect smaller by the mass ratio of the planet relative to the star?

It turns out by the square root of the mass ratio.

So it's much more significant because the mass ratio is tiny.

And so he said, let's write a paper about it.

We wrote, and it became a whole field of finding planets this way.