James Webb Telescope Finds Mysterious Double Objects The Size Of Jupiter In Space
Using the Webb Space Telescope, astronomers from the European Space Agency made an unexpected discovery. They discovered planet-like double objects that are not associated with stars and float freely in space in the Orion Nebula. The nature of their appearance has not yet been precisely determined
Scientists decided to study the Trapezium Orionis cluster in more detail. This is a young star-forming region about 1 million years old. In addition to stars, they also discovered brown dwarfs here, too small for the process of thermonuclear fusion to start in their cores – their mass is less than 7% of the Sun. While searching for other low-mass isolated objects, scientists found something they had never seen before – pairs of planet-like objects with masses ranging from 0.6 to 13 Jupiter masses. Scientists called such pairs JuMBO (Jupiter Mass Binary Objects).
Astronomers have spotted 40 pairs of JuMBO objects and two triple systems, all featuring very large orbits around each other. The distances between objects in such pairs turned out to be approximately 200 astronomical units, that is, 200 times greater than the distance between the Earth and the Sun. A full revolution of one object around another in this orbit takes from 20 thousand to 80 thousand years. The temperatures of the objects range from 537 °C to 1260 °C, and their age is about 1 million years. For comparison, the Solar System is 4.57 billion years old.
Scientists do not yet understand exactly the nature of their formation, but they have two main versions. It is worth noting that it is not yet clear at all whether these objects are planets. But scientists believe they may be.
