Astronomers Successfully Measure The Mass Of A Rogue Planet For The First Time

Astronomers Achieve Groundbreaking Feat: Weighing a Rogue Planet for the First Time In a remarkable breakthrough, an international team of astronomers, led by Dong Subo of Peking University in Beijing, has successfully measured the mass of a rogue planet, a type of celestial — that wanders through space without an orbit to call home.

This pioneering research, published in Science, marks a significant milestone in understanding these enigmatic objects. Rogue planets, thought to be fairly common, pose a challenge to astronomers due to their elusive nature. Detection relies on the microlens effect, where a planet’s gravity bends the light of a star, producing a flicker observable through a telescope.

However, this phenomenon alone does not provide sufficient information to determine the mass of the transiting object. The team, utilizing a series of ground-based telescopes and the Gaia spacecraft, located over 930,000 miles from Earth, was able to capture a microlensing event. By comparing data from both ground- and space-based telescopes, they employed a technique analogous to human depth perception, using two eyes to extract distance information.

This innovative approach enabled the team to determine the mass and distance of the rogue planet candidate separately.