The James Webb Space Telescope finds Jupiter sized planets free-floating in space.
The James Webb Space Telescope which is a Joint venture by NASA,ESA And canadian space agency found Jupiter sized planets free floating in Space and which do not orbit a star. These objects are named as Mass Binary Objects (JuMBOs) by the scientists.
Around 40 pairs of these objects free floating in space were identified by the James Webb Space Telescope, which is the largest and most powerful telescope in space, during the survey of the Orion Nebula.
What is the NASA’s James Webb Telescope?
The Telescope is a joint partnership between NASA, ESA and the Canadian Space agency.
The scientists were baffled when they noticed that the objects were found very small to be stars and they could not be classified as A planet too as these objects were not orbiting a star. This baffled the scientists.
An astronomer at Royal Observatory Greenwich said that it’s happening in the Orion Nebula where we have already seen hundreds of nascent planetary systems.
The Webb telescope was launched in 2021 and it started collecting data in 2022.This telescope has changed the understanding of the early universe and it takes stunning images of the cosmos. Since becoming operational. James Webb Telescope has revealed the existence of the earliest-known galaxies ,black holes, and given some very important data. This telescope is about 100 times more powerful than the Hubble telescope.
Scientists at the ESA gave two possible explanations for the origin of these giant objects. The first one is that they must have formed in regions of the Orion Nebula where the density of material was insufficient to create fully-fledged stars. The second explanation they gave is that they originally formed as planets around stars but were ejected from their orbits due to gravitational interactions.
The intriguing thing about the discovery is that these objects appear to be moving in pairs. Astronomers are currently struggling to explain them.
The Orion Nebula, also known by the name of M42, is the nearest, large star-forming region to Earth.
Read More: NASA
