They can’t all be stars.
Researchers using the James Webb Space Telescope have discovered six distant “rogue” worlds that may have alien origins.
What’s unusual is that none of the planet-sized objects, all of which have masses between five and fifteen times that of Jupiter, orbit a star, as Earth does the Sun.
A team from Johns Hopkins University believes these stars were actually brown dwarfs, the astronomical term for failed stars.
“If you have an object that looks like a young Jupiter, could it become a star under the right conditions?” said Adam Langfield, lead author of the study.
“Celestial Entities” – found in the NGC1333 nebula inside Perseus constellation is 960 light years away. – They most likely formed from the collapse of gas and dust in failed stars, New Scientist magazine reported.
European Space Agency Recently released New photos of the area.
Planetary scientists were shocked to discover that there is nothing with a mass less than five times that of Jupiter.
“In some ways, what’s most surprising is what we didn’t find,” researcher Ray Jayawardana told The New Orleans News. Now published in The Astronomical Journal.
An important distinction could be that brown dwarfs cannot be made of anything relatively lighter – as it is, the discovery is only about 10% of the mass of NGC1333.
“Our observations confirm that nature produces planetary-mass objects in at least two different ways,” Jayawardana said. He said in a statement:“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 did in our solar system.”
Among the six unique exoplanets, one planet stands out in particular.
An orbital ring of dust similar to that found in The perimeter was created. Around our solar system billions of years ago as it was forming.
“These small bodies with masses comparable to giant planets may be able to form their own planets,” added co-author Alex Schultz.
“This could be a nursery for a miniature planetary system on a scale much smaller than our solar system.”