In a surprising revelation, the James Webb Space Telescope has captured new images revealing pairs of planet-like objects located within the Orion Nebula, which had never been detected before.
The Orion Nebula, a luminous cloud of gas and dust in the night sky, is easily identifiable as the sword in the Orion constellation and lies approximately 1,300 light-years from Earth. It has long been a subject of study for astronomers, offering a wealth of celestial objects to explore, including brown dwarfs, planet-forming disks around stars, and objects with masses spanning the range between stars and planets.
Astronomers utilized the James Webb Telescope’s near-infrared camera, NIRCam, to capture mosaic images of the Orion Nebula at both short and long wavelengths of light, revealing unexpected findings and unprecedented details.
While examining the short-wavelength image of the Orion Nebula, astronomers Samuel G. Pearson and Mark J. McCaughrean focused their attention on the Trapezium Cluster, a young star-forming region approximately one million years old, teeming with thousands of newly formed stars.
In addition to identifying stars and brown dwarfs, which are too small for nuclear fusion to occur at their cores and therefore do not become stars, the scientists made a remarkable discovery: pairs of planet-like objects with masses ranging from 0.6 to 13 times that of Jupiter. These objects, which defy some fundamental astronomical theories, were dubbed Jupiter Mass Binary Objects, or JuMBOs.
Pearson, a European Space Agency research fellow, noted, “Although some of them are more massive than the planet Jupiter, they will be roughly the same size and only slightly larger.”
The astronomers identified around 40 pairs of JuMBOs and two triple systems, all of which are on wide orbits.
Mark J. McCaughrean, senior adviser for science and exploration at the European Space Agency, explained, “We are halfway through the life of the sun, so these objects in Orion are 3-day-old babies. They’re still quite luminous and warm because the energy they have when they get created still allows them to glow, which is how we can see these things in the first place.”
Pearson expressed that this discovery challenges existing theories of star and planet formation, suggesting that there may be something fundamentally flawed in our understanding of these processes.
In summary, the James Webb Space Telescope’s observations of the Orion Nebula have uncovered previously unknown Jupiter Mass Binary Objects, prompting scientists to reevaluate their understanding of star and planet formation.
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