For the first time, they measure a wandering planet that challenges what was known about individual worlds -

Thanks to a global collaboration, a team of astronomers has documented the characteristics of a starless planet.The team leader explained how this achievement will affect future space missions.

A wandering planet is a world traveling alone without an accompanying star.It moves alone through interstellar space.

For the first time, a team of scientists from 10 countries managed to directly measure the mass and distance of a rogue planet through coordinated observations from Earth and space.

They published the study in the journal Science, and the results provide access to previously inaccessible information about this type of planet.

The planet has a similar mass and is located 9,780 light years from the center of the galaxy.

"The biggest problem is timing, because this microlensing event only takes two days," Dr. Subo Dong of the Department of Astronomy at Peking University in China told Dr. Subo Dong.

What makes this possible is "a unique combination of luck, which can only happen once in Gaia's ten-year mission, and the persistence of microlensing research from Earth," he explained.

"During the two-day window of the event, Gaia not only saw the region, but thanks to a special configuration, observed the object six times in about sixteen hours, starting from close to the expansion peak.

What is needed - he points out in the interview - are ground-based surveys, such as KMTNet and OGLE, "which have tracked hundreds of millions of stars pointing towards the galactic bulge at high frequencies."

Thanks to the measurements, astronomers will be able to better understand how planets form and are ejected from any given star.

Teams from the Kavli Institute of Astronomy and Astrophysics, the Warsaw Astronomical Observatory, the University of Cambridge, the South Korean Institute of Science and Technology and other centers from China, South Korea, Poland, the United Kingdom, the United States, Germany, Israel and Switzerland participated.

Invisible worlds, new technologies

Rogue planets emit no light and are only discovered when their gravity bends light from a distant star in a phenomenon known as gravitation.

This technique has allowed us to identify some planets, but so far we have not been able to determine their exact size or location.These bodies are usually discovered by pure chance because their effects are brief and unknown.

Scientists were looking for an accurate way to measure their characteristics rather than relying on rough estimates.

The team observed the same phenomenon from Earth and from the Gaia telescope in space.Then they could calculate the parallax of the microlens, varying the time the light arrived, which allowed us to know the planet's mass and distance.

They wanted to know if orbiting planets are born into star systems and then ejected, or if they form on their own.This measure is key to understanding the history of the Milky Way.

galactic flash

On May 3, 2024, the KMTNet and OGLE efforts discovered the event, which they named KMT-2024-BLG-0792 and OGLE-2024-BLG-0516.

This was due to a temporary increase in the star's brightness caused by a wandering planet passing in front of the star, resulting in a gravitational microlensing effect.

The KMTNet telescopes in Chile, South Africa and Australia and the OGLE telescope at Las Campanas Observatory in Chile recorded high-frequency images.

The European Space Agency's Gaia space telescope observed the same event from space, 1.5 million kilometers from Earth.

"Light on Gaia peaked almost two hours later than on Earth," the researchers commented.This difference allowed us to calculate the planet's mass and distance.

The data show that the source star was a red giant located in the Milky Way's bulge.The planet that caused the lensing effect is located about 3050 parsecs away (equal to about 9943 light years).

The model used allows us to calculate that the planet has a mass of 0.219 times that of Jupiter, about the same as Saturn.This is the first time that the mass of a low-mass wandering planet has been determined with this precision.

International cooperation between telescopes on many continents and satellites in space has been important.

lonely planet

The discovery of a lonely planet confirms that the flashes captured by telescopes actually come from planetary matter worlds and not from unknown objects.

Her gross areas, more than most of the wolf in this time, expressed in a particular system with the starfulness.

The future is written in the stars.

Scientists know that observing rogue planets is rare because it depends on a precise alignment between the planet, the distant star and the observing instruments.

But each time it does, it adds a key piece to understanding the diversity and fate of these worlds.

In the coming years, NASA's Nancy Nyasha Roman Space Telescope, due to launch in 2027, will search for thousands of exoplanets using microlensing techniques.

A study published in the journal Science shows that a combination of observations from Earth and space allows direct measurements of the masses and distances of these planets, a strategy that will be critical to the success of future missions.

Current missions such as the European Space Agency's Gaia and future missions such as Euclid will enhance the search and research of these objects.

"This study is the first time that it has been possible to measure a rogue planet using the parallax microlensing method," emphasized scientist Dong.

"This paves the way so that in the future many more of these planets can be found systematically - he said in an interview -. The next space missions will have special equipment and plans to search for wandering planets without relying on luck. It will be possible from finding one by chance to finding many regularly."

Waiting for.Przemek Mróz, a professor at the Astronomical Observatory of the University of Warsaw in Poland, also commented on the future of the search for wandering planets.

"This discovery will undoubtedly be a powerful impetus for further intensive research into this class of objects," he said.

"Another upcoming mission is China's Earth 2.0 satellite, scheduled to launch in 2028. It will also search for rogue planets," Miroz said.

"Our findings show that the mass of these planets can be accurately measured using simultaneous observations from Earth and space. This could allow multiple teams to make coordinated observations of the same regions of the sky together with missions like Roman or Terra 2.0, for example, using the Vera Rubin Observatory," he added.