The James Webb Space Telescope has discovered dozens of seemingly physics-defying rogue objects floating in space in pairs, and scientists have no idea what they look like.
Moving freely through the Orion Nebula, there are 42 pairs of Jupiter-mass binary objects, or „JuMBOs.” Each object orbits its companion at a distance 390 times the distance between the Earth and the Sun.
Jumbos are too small to be stars, but since they are pairs, they are unlikely to be rogue planets ejected from the Solar System. Yet somehow they evolved. The researchers published their findings on October 2 in the preprint database arXiv and has not yet been peer-reviewed.
Related: The James Webb Telescope’s observations of 'impossible’ galaxies at the dawn of time may finally have an explanation.
„It is not clear how pairs of young planets are simultaneously ejected and bound, even if weakly at relatively wide separations.” The researchers wrote in the paper. They suggest that „perhaps a new, entirely separate formation mechanism” is responsible for the formation of odd pairs.
The rogue pairs pass through the Orion Nebula, a star-forming region about 1,344 light-years from Earth that contains stormy gas pierced by beams of starlight. Observations from ground-based telescopes had previously alerted researchers to other mysterious objects lurking in the gas cloud. Later, follow-up observations were made The James Webb Space Telescope Finally found them.
The researchers’ analysis revealed strange objects, gas giants about a million years old with temperatures of 1,300 degrees Fahrenheit (700 degrees Celsius). Their billowing mantle consists primarily of carbon monoxide, methane, and water vapor.
However, what really puzzled astronomers was that many of the objects came in pairs.
Stars can take tens of thousands of years to transform from collapsing clouds of cooling dust and gas into slowly glowing protostars before coalescing into giant balls of fusion-powered plasma like our Sun.
As a star forms, it spins up the cloud of gas it eats, weaving into a disk the sprinkled debris from which planets can form. Sometimes this disk breaks apart early, seeding a sphere of material that gives birth to a second star next to the first to form a binary system.
The theoretical lower limit for an object formed from a star-like cloud collapse is roughly three Jupiter masses—anything smaller should be associated with a star. This makes the existence of these pairs (each with masses close to that of Jupiter) difficult to explain. They may be ejected planets, but it is not clear how their binary relationship exited the solar system. Alternatively, they could be a new class of failed stars, but how they got so small is a mystery.
„A group of Planetary mass objects And the jumbos we see in the Trapezium cluster may arise from a combination of these two 'classical’ scenarios, even though both have significant caveats,” the researchers wrote. A starless disk is required.”
„Oddany rozwiązywacz problemów. Przyjazny hipsterom praktykant bekonu. Miłośnik kawy. Nieuleczalny introwertyk. Student.