NASA's very own James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) was used by European Space Agency (ESA) scientists to detect hundreds of lonely starless planets. What makes them even more odd is that several of them are moving as pairs.
JWST Finds Numerous Starless Planets
The starless planets have been nicknamed as JuMBOs, which stands for Jupiter Mass Binary Objects. These JuMBOs showed up in a new Orion Nebula survey. Roughly 40 pairs were intricately detailed in the new survey. The team made use of the incredible infrared sensitivity and resolution of the JWST for the new survey.
The Orion Nebula, also known as M42, is the largest and closest star-forming area to the Earth. In fact, it can be seen with the naked eye as a smudge in the sky.
According to the research paper that is yet to be peer-reviewed, JuMBOs are roughly a million years old. This makes them young compared to other components of the universe. The temperatures of their surfaces also lie at around 1,000 degrees Celsius. However, unlike typical planets that keep temperatures consistent, JuMBOs cool down later on and end up freezing. They also consist of large amounts of gas, which makes them incapable of fostering life.
The findings have left astronomers confused. They may even force scientists to rethink existing theories and models of explaining planetary formation. Prior to this discovery, scientists believe that nebulas were unable to make objects that have the size of planets. However, the new findings challenge these notions.
Odd Phenomenon
Experts have come up with two possible ways to explain the odd phenomenon. These objects could be proto-planets that are not yet fully developed or they could be originally from solar systems but ejected later on into interstellar space. At the moment, the latter hypothesis that focuses on ejection is more favored.
Mark McCaughrean, a senior advisor for science and exploration with the European Space Agency, explains that they were looking for tiny objects when they found the planets. McCaughrean describes the planets as having the mass of one or one-half of Jupiter's. The planets are also moving freely without being linked to any particular star.
McCaughrean also explains that, according to gas physics, it should not be possible to make Jupiter-massed objects one's own. It is also known that single planets could end up getting kicked from solar systems. However, the question lies on how a pair of planets could be kicked out at the same time? At the moment, the answer is yet to be found.
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