NEW YORK, BRONX (ORDO News) — The line between planets and stars has always been somewhat blurred, but a recent discovery has further confused the distinction. Observations from the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) have revealed the presence of extremely small objects in the Trapezium Cluster, located in the Orion Nebula. This cluster, which is only 300 thousand years old, provides valuable information about the formation of stars, brown dwarfs and planets.
Brown dwarfs, which have 13 to 80 times the mass of Jupiter, are often seen as boundary objects between planets and stars. A stellar object with a higher mass has a core dense enough to fuse hydrogen into helium, making it a star. Anything less than this mass cannot even fuse deuterium, which is why they are gas giants.
However, there is another approach to classifying these objects, based on the way they are formed. Stars form from clouds of gas that collapse in on themselves when there is too much gas in a small space. This requires cold gas because hot gas dissipates. But the gas can’t be too big or too small—it must cool and condense to form a stellar object. Previous observations in the Orion Nebula suggested that, under the right conditions, objects with a mass three times less than the mass of Jupiter could be formed.
New JWST observations show that there may be objects with a mass 0.6 times less than the mass of Jupiter. These objects could potentially be rogue planets, free-floating planets that have escaped from the stars around which they formed as a result of some dramatic interaction. Alternatively, they could have formed as stars, although there is currently no theoretical explanation for this.
Dr Mark McCorin, senior advisor for science and exploration at the European Space Agency, explained: “If there is interaction in the disk, then it is possible that one of these planets could be ejected. So it is believed that regions such as Orion should be like free-floating planets that originally formed in disks.”
However, the presence of 40 such planet-sized objects in binary systems calls into question existing theories of star and planet formation. These Jupiter-mass binary objects (JuMBOs) indicate that they should form very differently from planets of the same masses. This discovery has scientists baffled, and they are eager to continue studying and understanding the complexities of planet and star formation.
—
Online:
News agencies contributed to this report, edited and published by ORDO News editors.
Contact us: [email protected]
Our Standards, Terms of Use: Standard Terms And Conditions.
To eliminate any confusion arising from different time zones and daylight saving changes, all times displayed on our platforms are in Coordinated Universal Time (UTC).