New and remarkable images released by the miraculous James Webb Space Telescope reveal new details about the Orion Nebula – located 1,300 light years from Earth – the brightest in the night sky, containing clouds of dust and gas Are.
Astronomers are studying the Orion Nebula because of the abundance of celestial objects it contains, including planet-forming disks around young stars and brown dwarfs.
During the study, astronomer Samuel G. Pearson and Mark J. McCaughrean focused on the Trapezium Cluster – a young star-forming region about 1 million years old – that is filled with thousands of new stars.
Experts also identified brown dwarfs – stars too small to initiate nuclear fusion at their cores to become stars.
Astronomers also found for the first time a planet-like object with a mass between 0.6 and 13 times that of Jupiter, which seeks to challenge some astronomical theories.
Astronomers call these Jupiter Mass Binary Objects, or JuMBOs.
Pearson, a European Space Agency (ESA) research fellow at the European Space Research and Technology Center in the Netherlands: “Although some of them are more massive than the planet Jupiter, they will be about the same size and only slightly larger.”
Astronomers found 40 pairs of JuMBOs and two triple systems, all in wide orbits around each other.
Although they exist in pairs, the objects are typically about 200 astronomical units apart, or 200 times the distance between Earth and the Sun.
It may take 20,000 to 80,000 years for the objects to complete their orbit around each other.
“Objects have temperatures up to 1,000 degrees Fahrenheit [537 degrees Celsius] to 2,300 F [1,260 C],” Pearson said the gaseous objects are young, astronomically speaking – about 1 million years old.
“We’re halfway through the Sun’s life, so these objects in Orion are 3-day-old babies,” said McCaughrean, senior advisor for science and exploration at ESA.
“They’re still quite bright and hot because the energy they contain when they form still allows them to shine, which is how we can see these things for the first time.”
McCaughrean said: “This process continues as disks of gas and dust swirl around stars, forming planets. But no current theory explains how JUMBOs form, or how they form in the Orion Nebula. “Why do I exist?”
“Scientists have been working on theories and models of star and planet formation for decades, but none of them would have predicted that we would find pairs of very low-mass objects floating alone in space – and we would find very few of them. Looking from,” Pearson said.
“The main thing we learn from this is that there is something fundamentally wrong with our understanding of planet formation, star formation, or both.”
“The Orion Nebula is a favorite observation target of astronomers, and the larger and more sophisticated telescopes become, the more objects are revealed within the nebula,” McCaughrean said.
“Even though the objects we’re seeing are really faint, they’re brightest in the infrared, so you have the best chance of detecting them,” Pearson explained. cnn,
“JWST is the most powerful infrared telescope ever built and these observations would not be possible with any other telescope.”
“Observations of the nebula scheduled for early 2024 may provide further insight into the atmospheric compositions of JuMBOs,” Pearson said.
“The main question is, what?! Where did that come from?” Pearson said that “this is so unexpected that it will require many future observations and modeling to explain it.”