Scientists at the European Space Agency (ESA) have used NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope to make a stunning discovery: a free-floating object the size of Jupiter, the largest planet in our solar system, in the Orion Nebula, the closest star-forming region to Earth.
This discovery has changed our understanding of how stars and planets form. Previously, scientists thought nebulae, which birth stars within enormous clouds of gas and dust, were incapable of spontaneously creating planet-sized objects, but the new findings suggest otherwise.
Even more confusing is the fact that the objects form in pairs, not individually.
“There’s something wrong with our understanding of planet formation, star formation – or both,” Samuel Pearson, an ESA scientist who worked on the research, told The New York Times. “They shouldn’t exist.”
New space pictures!🤩
James NASA/ESA/CSA #Web The Space Telescope has added a detailed image of the Orion Nebula to our ESASky app.
Zoom into this region with a variety of phenomena including protostars, brown dwarfs, and even free-floating planets! pic.twitter.com/In4FQk8hrX
— ESA (@esa) October 2, 2023
These new entities are called Jupiter Mass Binary Objects, or JuMBOs. They are not large enough to be stars, and because they do not orbit around stars, JuMBOs are not technically planets.
“Most of us don’t have time to engage in debates about what is and what is not a planet,” Professor Mark McCaughrean, senior advisor for science and exploration at ESA, told The Guardian. “It’s like my car is a pet the size of a chihuahua. But it’s not a chihuahua. It’s a cat.”
According to a research paper co-authored by McCaughrean and not yet peer-reviewed, JuMBO is about a million years old, making it younger than any other creature in the universe. The surface temperature is approximately 1,000 degrees Celsius (1,800 degrees Fahrenheit).
But unlike planets, which are ultimately able to maintain a consistent temperature thanks to the energy they receive from the star they orbit, JuMBO eventually cools quickly and freezes. Most of these planets are also composed of gas, making it unlikely they would be able to support life.
Scientists have many hypotheses about how JuMBO emerged. The first is that they form in areas of the nebula that are too sparse to produce viable stars. Second, they formed as planets that were meant to orbit a star, but were then “evicted” for unknown reasons.
“The ejection hypothesis is the most favored hypothesis at the moment,” McCaughrean told the BBC. “We know that a planet can be ejected from a star system. But how do you put these things together? At this time, we don’t have the answer. This is something reserved for theorists.”
Other scientists call this pairing phenomenon unprecedented.
“My reactions ranged from ‘What?!?’ to ‘Are you sure?’ to ‘That’s so strange’ to ‘How can binaries be ejected together?’” astronomer Heidi Hammel, who was not part of the research team, told the BBC.
No current scientific models, he said, predict a pair of planet-sized objects ejected from the nebula, but he added that there may not have been a telescope powerful enough to detect them before.
Scientists and astronomers have studied the Orion Nebula for years to observe the formation and early evolution of stars and other celestial bodies.
It is located 1,350 light years from Earth and is visible to the naked eye as a misty smudge at the bottom of the constellation Orion, part of the “sword” of a mythical Greek hunter for whom the constellation is named.
2023-10-20 09:36:04
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