NEW YORK: Free-floating Jupiter-sized “planets” discovered in space that orbit only one another are baffling astronomers and forcing them to rethink theories of star and planet formation.
In October, astronomers used NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope to identify about 500 previously unseen spots in the Orion Nebula.
The telescope observed about 40 pairs in a new detailed survey of the famous Orion Nebula, finding that dozens of worlds appear to orbit each other in pairs.
Now, in a Wired article originally published in Quanta Magazine, scientists attempt to explain so-called Jupiter-mass binary objects (JUMBOs), pairs of freely floating gas giants that orbit only each other. I tried.
They say these objects exist in unexpectedly large numbers because they are too light to form on their own.
One possibility is that planets with “closely spaced orbits” could be dragged out of the solar system by passing stars.
Still, “we’re missing something, and we don’t know what it is,” says Nienke van der Marel, a researcher who studies planet formation at the Leiden Observatory in the Netherlands.
Jumbo wronged experts in both star and planet formation.
“Nothing like this was predicted at all. There is no existing theory that could predict that there would be so many free-floating planetary objects so wide,” said Astrophysicist at the University of Exeter, who specializes in star formation. says scholar Matthew Bate.
At least some of the jumbo is probably a mirage.
“The deeper an object is in a dusty environment (and the Orion Nebula is extremely dusty), the more likely it is to associate it with a distant, more massive star behind the nebula that would likely have a partner. It becomes difficult to differentiate.” report.
“We have to be a little cautious at the moment,” says Nuria Millet Roig of the University of Vienna.
