Produced by: Mohsin Shaikh
Gaia was built to map stars, not find planets. Yet, its precise tracking of stellar wobbles just led to the discovery of a giant exoplanet and a mysterious brown dwarf.
Planets tug on their stars, making them wobble ever so slightly. Gaia’s ultra-precise astrometry detected this motion, revealing hidden worlds orbiting far-off suns.
Representative pic
Gaia-4b, a planet 12 times the mass of Jupiter, orbits a surprisingly low-mass star. Scientists are baffled—how did such a massive world form around such a small star?
Credit: ESA
Gaia-5b sits between planet and star, too small for fusion but too big to be a planet. This cosmic misfit challenges what we know about substellar objects.
Credit: ESA
Astronomers examined 28 possible Gaia planet candidates—21 turned out to be binary stars, but two were confirmed as true substellar companions.
Gaia needed backup. Astronomers used ground-based telescopes to confirm its findings, proving that combining astrometry with radial velocity is a game-changer.
Representative pic
Gaia’s latest discoveries are just the beginning. Scientists expect a flood of new planets and brown dwarfs as more data is analyzed in the coming years.
Representative pic
Every new planet found reshapes our understanding of how worlds form. Could Gaia’s bizarre discoveries mean our own solar system isn’t as "typical" as we once thought?
Designed to map the Milky Way, Gaia may go down as one of history’s greatest planet hunters—proving that sometimes, the best discoveries are the ones we never planned for.