Astronomers Successfully Weigh a Starless ‘Rogue Planet’ Drifting Through the Milky Way
Astronomers have precisely measured the mass of a rogue planet wandering through the Milky Way using a rare gravitational microlensing event. By combining observations from ground-based telescopes across three continents with data from ESA’s Gaia spacecraft, researchers determined the planet’s distance and found it to be about the mass of Saturn. The discovery provides one of the clearest measurements of a free-floating planet to date and suggests that such starless worlds may be far more common than previously thought, offering new clues about planetary formation and evolution.
