When they discovered pairs of planet-like objects, the scientists were looking for low-mass solitary objects.
New photos from the James Webb Space Telescope have made an unexpected discovery: pairs of planet-like objects in the Orion Nebula. The artifacts had never before been discovered.
The Orion Nebula is one of the brightest nebulae in the night sky and is a brilliant cloud consisting of gas and dust. It is easily recognized as the sword in the constellation of Orion.
Astronomers have always had a wide variety of celestial objects to investigate in the Orion Nebula, which is 1,300 light-years from Earth. These objects include included brown dwarfs, planet-forming disks surrounding stars, and objects with a mass somewhere between that of stars and planets.
Astronomers captured mosaics of the Orion Nebula using the near-infrared camera of the James Webb Telescope, known as NIRCam, which revealed surprising findings and unprecedented details.
The Trapezium Cluster, a young star-forming region that is around one million years old and bursting at the seams with thousands of new stars, was the subject of a detailed examination by astronomers Samuel G. Pearson and Mark J. McCaughrean when they examined the short-wavelength image of the Orion Nebula.
Astronomers look for isolated low-mass objects.
The scientists also discovered brown dwarfs, which are objects too small for nuclear fusion to begin at their cores and grow into stars, along with the stars themselves. Brown dwarfs have masses that are less than 7% of the sun’s mass.
The astronomers were looking for further low-mass solitary objects when they came across pairs of planet-like objects that appeared to defy several basic astronomical assumptions and had masses between 0.6 and 13 times the mass of Jupiter. The scientists gave them the name JuMBOs, which stands for Jupiter Mass Binary Object.
According to Pearson, a research fellow for the European Space Agency at the European Space Research and Technology Centre in the Netherlands, “they will be roughly the same size and only slightly larger,” despite the fact that some of them are more massive than the planet Jupiter.
The researchers discovered over 40 pairs of JuMBOs and two triple systems, all on broad orbits.
Senior scientific and exploration consultant for the European Space Agency McCaughrean stated, “We are halfway through the sun’s life, thus these objects in Orion are 3-day newborns. Because of the energy they had when they were generated, which is how we were able to perceive these objects in the first place, they are still highly light and warm.
Scientists have spent decades developing theories and models of how stars and planets evolve, but none of them had ever anticipated that we would discover pairs of extremely low mass objects floating alone in space, which is exactly what we’re doing.
The important lesson from this, he continued, is that we have a fundamentally flawed understanding of either planet creation, star formation, or both.