Authors
Subo Dong, Zexuan Wu, Yoon-Hyun Ryu, Andrzej Udalski, Przemek Mróz, Krzysztof A Rybicki, Simon T Hodgkin, Łukasz Wyrzykowski, Laurent Eyer, Thomas Bensby, Ping Chen, Sharon X Wang, Andrew Gould, Hongjing Yang, Michael D Albrow, Sun-Ju Chung, Cheongho Han, Kyu-Ha Hwang, Youn Kil Jung, In-Gu Shin, Yossi Shvartzvald, Jennifer C Yee, Weicheng Zang, Dong-Jin Kim, Chung-Uk Lee, Byeong-Gon Park, Radosław Poleski, Jan Skowron, Michał K Szymański, Igor Soszyński, Paweł Pietrukowicz, Szymon Kozłowski, Dorota M Skowron, Krzysztof Ulaczyk, Mariusz Gromadzki, Milena Ratajczak, Patryk Iwanek, Marcin Wrona, Mateusz J Mróz, Guy Rixon, Diana L Harrison, Elmé Breedt
Published in
Science (New York, N.Y.). Volume 391. Issue 6780. Pages 96-99. Epub Jan 01, 2026.
Abstract
A population of free-floating planets is known from gravitational microlensing surveys. None have a directly measured mass, owing to a degeneracy with the distance, but the population statistics indicate that many are less massive than Jupiter. We report a microlensing event-KMT-2024-BLG-0792/OGLE-2024-BLG-0516, which was observed from both ground- and space-based telescopes-that breaks the mass-distance degeneracy. The event was caused by an object with [Formula: see text] Jupiter masses that is either gravitationally unbound or on a very wide orbit. Through comparison with the statistical properties of other observed microlensing events and predictions from simulations, we infer that this object likely formed in a protoplanetary disk (like a planet), not in isolation (like a brown dwarf). Dynamical processes then ejected it from its birthplace, producing a free-floating object.
PMID:
41477875
Bibliographic data and abstract were imported from PubMed on 02 Jan 2026.
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