James Webb telescope finds never-before detected pairs of planet-like objects in Orion Nebula

In a surprising revelation, the James Webb Space Telescope’s new images found pairs of planet-like objects located in the Orion Nebula. The objects had never been detected earlier.  

The Orion Nebula is a glowing cloud made of gas and dust and is among the night sky’s brightest nebulae. It is clearly identifiable as the sword in the Orion constellation.

The Orion Nebula, which is located 1,300 light-years from Earth, has for long provided astronomers with a lot of celestial objects to study, which included brown dwarfs, planet-forming disks around stars, or objects with a mass ranging between that of stars and planets.

The near-infrared camera of the James Webb Telescope, called NIRCam, was used by astronomers to capture Orion Nebula’s mosaics in short and long wavelengths of light, which revealed unexpected discoveries and unprecedented details.

When the Orion Nebula’s short-wavelength image was studied by the astronomers Samuel G. Pearson and Mark J. McCaughrean, they closely looked into the Trapezium Cluster, a young star-forming region that’s around one million years old and filled with thousands of new stars till the brim.

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Astronomers hunt for low-mass isolated objects

Along with the stars, brown dwarfs – which are too small in size for nuclear fusion to start at their cores and become stars – were spotted by the scientists. The mass of brown dwarfs is below 7 per cent of the mass of the sun.

While hunting for other low-mass isolated objects, the astronomers discovered pairs of planet-like objects, which had masses between 0.6 and 13 times the mass of Jupiter, and appeared to defy a few fundamental astronomical theories. They were dubbed by the scientists as Jupiter Mass Binary Objects or JuMBOs.

“Although some of them are more massive than the planet Jupiter, they will be roughly the same size and only slightly larger,” stated Pearson, a European Space Agency research fellow at the European Space Research and Technology Centre in the Netherlands.

Around 40 pairs of JuMBOs and two triple systems were found by the astronomers, all on wide orbits.

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European Space Agency’s senior adviser for science and exploration McCaughrean said, “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.”

“Scientists have been working on theories and models of star and planet formation for decades, but none of them have ever predicted that we would find pairs of super low mass objects floating alone in space — and we’re seeing lots of them,” said Pearson.

“The main thing that we learn from this is that there is something fundamentally wrong with either our understanding of planet formation, star formation, or both,” he added.

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