They can’t all be stars.
Researchers using the James Webb Telescope have discovered six distant “rogue” worlds that may have peculiar origins.
What’s uncommon is that none of the planet-sized bodies, all between five and 15 times Jupiter’s mass, orbit a star, as the Earth does to the sun.
A Johns Hopkins University team is drawn to the potential that these were actually brown dwarfs, the astronomic term for failed stars.
“If you have an object that looks like a young Jupiter, is it possible that it could have become a star under the right conditions?” said lead study author Adam Langeveld.
The “celestial entities” — found in the nebula NGC1333 within the Persues constellation 960 light years away — most likely formed from the failed stars’ collapse of gasses and dust, reported New Scientist magazine.
The European Space Agency recently released new images of the region.
The planetary scientists were shocked that nothing there embodied a mass beneath what would be five times the size of Jupiter.
“In some ways, what’s most striking is what we didn’t find,” researcher Ray Jayawardhana told the outlet of the discovery, now published in “The Astronomical Journal.”
It could be an important distinction that brown dwarfs cannot form from anything comparatively lighter — as it is, the discovery equated to only about 10% of NGC1333’s mass.
“Our observations confirm that nature produces planetary mass objects in at least two different ways,” Jayawardhana said in a release. “From the contraction of a cloud of gas and dust, the way stars form, and in disks of gas and dust around young stars, as Jupiter in our own solar system did.”
And, of the six unique exoplanets, one stands out in particular.
It was observed to sport an orbital ring of dust similar to one that created a perimeter around our own solar system billions of years ago during its formation.
“Those tiny objects with masses comparable to giant planets may themselves be able to form their own planets,” added co-author Aleks Scholz.
“This might be a nursery of a miniature planetary system on a scale much smaller than our solar system.”
