Latest news with #JuMBOs
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a day ago
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Mysterious 'rogue' objects discovered by James Webb telescope may not actually exist, new simulations hint
When you buy through links on our articles, Future and its syndication partners may earn a commission. Mysterious "rogue" pairs of Jupiter-size objects spotted by the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) are a tiny fraction of those that originally formed, a new study suggests. The finding hints that these enigmatic entities, dubbed "JuMBOs," are even rarer than previously thought — and casts doubt on their very existence. JuMBOs, short for "Jupiter-mass binary objects," are pairs of planet-like, Jupiter-size objects that JWST spotted in the trapezoid region of the Orion Nebula Cluster in 2023. Each JuMBO comprises two gas giants between 0.7 and 30 times Jupiter's mass. The members of a JuMBO don't orbit stars; instead, they twirl around each other at distances of approximately 25 to 400 astronomical units, making them free-floating or "rogue." (One astronomical unit is approximately 93 million miles, or 150 million kilometers, the average distance between Earth and the sun.) The objects' paired status and their apparent lack of tethering to any star have challenged existing notions of how planets are born. That hasn't stopped scientists from floating several ideas about JuMBO formation, including that they formed around a star, just like the solar system's planets, but were jointly lured away by another star. An alternate hypothesis is that JuMBOs are the eroded cores of embryonic stars, suggesting they formed like stars. However, some researchers are skeptical that JUMBOs even exist. For instance, in 2024, Kevin Luhman, a professor in the Department of Astronomy and Astrophysics at Penn State, reanalyzed the JWST observations and suggested that the purported pairs aren't planets after all. Instead, he proposed that they're distant background objects that had been serendipitously captured in JWST's snapshots of the Orion Nebula Cluster. In fact, Richard Parker, a senior lecturer in astrophysics at the University of Sheffield in the U.K. and the lead author of the new study, told Live Science via email that it was a discussion about Luhman's work that prompted the new study. During this group meeting, Simon Goodwin, a professor of theoretical astrophysics at the University of Sheffield and the new study's second author, suggested that simulations could help identify how susceptible JUMBOs are to destruction. Indeed, no previous research had examined how long these planetary pairs persist in interstellar space. Such environments are packed with growing stars that could fragment the duos via their powerful gravitational pulls. Related: Not 'Little Red Dots' or roaring quasars: James Webb telescope uncovers new kind of 'hidden' black hole never seen before To figure out how effectively JuMBOs tolerated the turbulence of their birth environment, Parker, Goodwin and Jessica Diamond, an integrated Masters student at the University of Sheffield, created a computer model of a nebula containing a mixture of stars and JuMBOs that totaled 1,500 components, in an arrangement that likely mimicked the Orion Nebula Cloud's original composition, Parker explained. The researchers then generated five copies of this model that differed in various internal parameters, such as the distance between members of a given planetary duo and how crowded the nebula was overall. For each model copy, the team conducted 10 rounds of N-body simulations. "These computer simulations calculate the force due to gravity on each object from all of the other objects,' Parker said, adding that such calculations, performed repeatedly, can reveal how different components of the model nebula interact over time. The researchers found that the simulated JuMBOs were extremely ephemeral. In a dense nebula, for instance, nearly 90% of the planet pairs were destroyed by neighboring stars within a million years. Even in the best-case scenario — when there were fewer stars overall in the nebula and the JuMBOs waltzed in tighter orbits — only half of the planet pairs resisted any disruption. The analyses also revealed that the more widely separated a planet pair was, the more likely it would get disrupted. RELATED STORIES —James Webb telescope spots 'groundbreaking' molecule in scorching clouds of giant 'hell planet' —JWST spies frigid alien world on bizarre orbit: 'One of the coldest, oldest and faintest planets that we've imaged to date' —'We know so little': Bizarre 'runaway' planets discovered by James Webb telescope may be failed stars in disguise Parker said that since he and his colleagues had previously found that star-planet systems are very fragile in environments chock-full of stars, he wasn't particularly surprised by the findings, noting that "[b]ecause the planet-planet binaries are less massive, they have a lower energy and are even more susceptible to destruction." The results, published May 2 in the journal Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society: Letters, show that the observed JuMBOs are extremely rare. But Parker said this hints at the same disturbing possibility proposed by Luhman: that they don't really exist. That's because, to explain the JWST-detected JuMBO numbers, the planet pairs would have had to have been produced in much larger numbers than currently thought. According to Parker, this result likely adds support to the interpretation of JuMBOs as background noise. "I think the next steps are for someone else to take the original JWST data and to analyse it again," he added.
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10-03-2025
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These mysterious objects born in violent clashes between young star systems aren't stars or planets
When you buy through links on our articles, Future and its syndication partners may earn a commission. Are they stars? Are they planets? Or are they neither? Some rogue planetary mass objects that wander the cosmos alone could be created when young star systems clash, meaning they represent an entire cosmic class of their own. Free-floating, planetary mass objects are bodies with around 13 times the mass of Jupiter that are often found drifting through young star clusters, such as the Trapezium Cluster in Orion. Their origins posed a particular puzzle in 2023, when astronomers discovered 40 pairs of planetary mass objects called Jupiter-Mass Binary Objects, or JuMBOs, in the Orion nebula. With masses lower than those of the smallest stars but greater than those of the most massive planets, the big question has been: Do these bodies form like stars or like planets? The problem is, however, that neither origin can account for the binary nature of JuMBOs — or, in fact, the overabundance of free-floating planetary mass objects in general. "Planetary mass objects don't fit neatly into existing categories of stars or planets," Deng Hongping of the Shanghai Astronomical Observatory at the Chinese Academy of Sciences said in a statement. "Our simulations show they likely form through a completely different process — one tied to the chaotic dynamics of young star clusters."The new research has shown that these cosmic orphans could be forged when flattened clouds of gas and dust called "circumstellar disks" around infant stars violently interact. This violent interaction could be happening when the young stars are clustered together. Previously, scientists theorized that free-floating planetary mass objects are simply rogue planets, ejected from their home star systems through interactions with passing stars or gravitational tussles with their own sibling planets. However, the existence of pairs of JuMBOs has challenged this idea. That's because it's difficult to explain how an event could be violent enough to eject a planet from its star system at high speeds while not separating it from a binary partner. While it is conceivable that some freak event could cause this, the detection of 40 pairs of JuMBOs in one nebula suggests that whatever created them is more common than a one-off event. Another "secret identity" suggested for free-floating planetary mass objects are brown dwarfs. These objects are thought to form like stars when dense patches in vast clouds of gas and dust collapse. However, whereas stars gather mass from their prenatal envelopes of gas and dust until the pressure and temperature in their cores is sufficient to trigger the fusion of hydrogen to helium, the nuclear process that defines what a star is, brown dwarfs fail to harvest enough mass to trigger such a process. That leaves these "failed stars" with masses between 13 and 75 times that of Jupiter (0.013 to 0.075 times the mass of the sun). Moreover, the chance of finding stars with binary partners decreases rapidly as their masses fall. So, while 75% of massive stars have a partner, only around 50% of stars with mass like the sun are in binaries. This binary rate drops to near zero for the smallest stars, so as stellar bodies with even smaller masses, there should be very little chance of finding brown dwarfs in if free-floating planetary mass objects are indeed brown dwarfs, the sheer number of them seen as binary systems is difficult to explain. To get to the bottom of this mystery, Deng and colleagues performed a high-resolution hydrodynamic simulation of close encounters between two circumstellar disks around infant stars. The team found that when these disks collide at speeds of around 4,500 to 6,700 miles per hour (7,242 to 10,783 kilometers per hour), at separations of around 300 to 400 times the distance between Earth and the sun, a "tidal bridge" of gas and dust is formed. These tidal bridges collapse to create dense filaments of gas that break apart to make "seeds" of planetary mass objects, the team explains, with masses around 10 times that of Jupiter. The simulations revealed that around 14% of these bodies are formed in pairs or triplets with separations around seven to 15 times the distance between the sun and Earth. This would explain the abundance of JuMBOs in Orion. The team's results are supported by the fact that disk encounters between stars are known to be common in dense stellar environments like that of Trapezium Cluster. That means these regions could generate hundreds of planetary mass objects, explaining their abundant populations in the cosmos. Related Stories: — The mystery of how strange cosmic objects called 'JuMBOs' went rogue — Stars get ripped open like Christmas presents to create strange 'JuMBO' worlds — James Webb Space Telescope glimpses Earendel, the most distant star known in the universe "This discovery partly reshapes how we view cosmic diversity," team member Lucio Mayer from the University of Zurich said. "Planetary mass objects may represent a third class of objects, born not from the raw material of star-forming clouds or via planet-building processes, but rather from the gravitational chaos of disk collisions" The team's research was published on Feb. 26 in the journal Science Advances.
