![](https://i.imgur.com/CLvY2jA.png")
03-10-2023, 08:39 AM
2 Oct 2023
Scientists at the European Space Agency (ESA) have used NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope to make an astonishing discovery: free-floating objects the size of Jupiter, the largest planet in our solar system, in the Orion Nebula, the nearest star-forming region to Earth.
The discovery has upended our understanding of how stars and planets are formed. Before this, scientists thought nebulas, which give birth to stars inside huge clouds of gas and dust, weren’t capable of spontaneously creating planet-sized objects, but the new findings suggest otherwise.
Even more baffling is the fact that the objects are formed in pairs instead of individually.
“There’s something wrong with either our understanding of planet formation, star formation – or both,” Samuel Pearson, an ESA scientist who worked on the research, told The New York Times. “They shouldn’t exist.”
The new entities have been called Jupiter Mass Binary Objects, or JuMBOs. They aren’t big enough to be stars, and because they don’t orbit around a star, JuMBOs aren’t technically planets.
https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2023/10/2...scientists
Scientists at the European Space Agency (ESA) have used NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope to make an astonishing discovery: free-floating objects the size of Jupiter, the largest planet in our solar system, in the Orion Nebula, the nearest star-forming region to Earth.
The discovery has upended our understanding of how stars and planets are formed. Before this, scientists thought nebulas, which give birth to stars inside huge clouds of gas and dust, weren’t capable of spontaneously creating planet-sized objects, but the new findings suggest otherwise.
Even more baffling is the fact that the objects are formed in pairs instead of individually.
“There’s something wrong with either our understanding of planet formation, star formation – or both,” Samuel Pearson, an ESA scientist who worked on the research, told The New York Times. “They shouldn’t exist.”
The new entities have been called Jupiter Mass Binary Objects, or JuMBOs. They aren’t big enough to be stars, and because they don’t orbit around a star, JuMBOs aren’t technically planets.
https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2023/10/2...scientists
