Wandering planets: New cosmic formation discovered by James Webb Telescope

While studying a star-forming cluster called NGC 1333, about 960 light-years from Earth, the James Webb Space Telescope detected six solitary “rogue” planets (not orbiting a star) in the Perseus Molecular Cloud. According to a paper describing the research, which has been accepted for publication in The Astronomical Journal, These worlds are like stars, meaning they formed directly from a cloud of gas and dust..

This origin is a sign that, unlike most planets, which form in a protoplanetary disk around a star, the same cosmic processes that “form” stars can also create objects slightly larger than Jupiter. The six planets showed masses between five and ten times that of our Gas Giant.

The discovery opens up a line of research into the process of star and planet formation, said lead author Adam Langeveld, an astrophysicist at Johns Hopkins University, in a statement. “If you have an object that looks like a young Jupiter, is it possible for it to become a star under the right conditions?” he asks.

Investigation of wandering planets born as stars

To investigate “the faintest members of a young star cluster,” the authors performed an “extremely deep” spectroscopic examination of the young star cluster NGC1333 using the NIRISS-WFSS instrument on the James Webb Space Telescope; a slit that scatters the light from an object.

Observers who have found no objects smaller than five Jupiters (although they have the sensitivity to go beyond that) have confirmed that nature produces planets in two ways: by the contraction of a star-like cloud of gas and dust; and in accretion disks around young stars“It’s like Jupiter does in our own solar system,” explains co-author Ray Jayawardhana, dean of Hopkins.

Interestingly, the least massive of the six planets, with a mass of five Jupiters (1,600 Earths), has developed a sort of protoplanetary disk around itself, raising a question for the future: If objects do form there, will they be mini-planets or moons?

James Webb Discovers More Wandering Planets Than Expected

In addition to the six star-born wandering planets, researchers discovered another unusual object in NGC 1333: a brown star with a planet. Because its accretion disk is theoretically insufficient to form planetary objects, the star challenges theories of how binary systems form.

“Such a pair is likely to have formed from a cloud that broke apart as it contracted, in the same way as binary star systems,” Jayawardhana theorizes.

As for the wandering planets, also called floating objects, They always cause confusion in the classification of celestial bodies.They were thought to be rare in the Milky Way because they have masses that overlap with gas giants and brown dwarfs. However, new data from Webb show that they may make up as much as 10% of the objects in the observed cluster.

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