‘Impossible’ planets may be more common in the universe than we thought

In a recent interview, European Space Agency (ESA) Senior Advisor for Science and Research, Dr. Mark McCaughrean explained: Planets with unique properties are observed in the universe.

For example, the Orion Nebula region should contain planets that form in planetary disks, but these are binaries; And scientists haven’t been able to fully explain how these pairs stay together even after planet formation.

In the last century we stopped observing only the planets in the Solar System and We discovered more than 5 thousand cosmic worlds in different parts of the universe. Some of it can be explained by our understanding of science, but astronomers still don’t know much about how other planets form.

Recently, the team responsible for ESA’s Cheops satellite announced the discovery of LTT9779b, an exoplanet as large as Neptune with a temperature of 2000 degrees Celsius. One thing scientists have noticed is that there should be no clouds or atmosphere, but metallic clouds have been recorded reflecting up to 80% of starlight received from space.

“If there’s interaction in a disk, maybe you can eject one of these planets. So in regions like Orion, it’s thought that there must be free-floating types of planets that originally formed in disks. The real problem is, about 40 of them are in binaries. They’re in pairs. So what about a violent planet like that?” How do you throw out two things that stay together when they show up in the event? So I’m an observer: that’s exactly what Dr. Mark McCaughrean told the website: “I aim to summarize things for theorists.” IFLSscience.

‘Impossible’ planets?

Other research shows that the Orion Nebula hosts planets floating in pairs called JuMBOs (Jupiter Mass Binary Objects), which have about 60% of the mass of Jupiter. Researchers believe that, for some unknown reason, they formed like stars, not planets.

In December 2023, a team of scientists published a paper describing how they used the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) to study the IC 348 star cluster near the star-forming region of the constellation Perseus. They found three red dwarfs with up to eight times the mass of Jupiter, a feature that challenges existing data in existing cosmological models.

“It is easy enough for current models to form giant planets in a disk around a star. But in this cluster, this object is unlikely to form in a disk, but rather as a star, and is 300 times smaller than Jupiter’s three masses. Catarina Alves, one of ESA researchers “How does the star formation process work in such small, much, much smaller masses?” de Oliveira said about the smallest brown dwarfs ever detected.

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