Kavli Affiliate: Subo Dong
| Summary:
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 0.219^+0.075_-0.046 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), and dynamical processes then ejected it from its birth place, producing a free-floating object.
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