Unprecedented discovery seems to defy fundamental astronomical theories

New images from the James Webb Space Telescope have revealed surprising pairs of planet-like objects in the Orion Nebula that have never been detected before.

New images from the James Webb Space Telescope have revealed surprising pairs of planet-like objects in the Orion Nebula that have never been detected before.

The Orion Nebula, a glowing cloud of dust and gas, is one of the brightest nebulae in the night sky and identifiable as the sword in the Orion constellation.

Located 1,300 light-years from Earth, the nebula has long presented astronomers with a wealth of celestial objects to study, including planet-forming disks around young stars and brown dwarfs, or objects with a mass between that of planets and stars.

Astronomers used Webb’s near-infrared camera, called NIRCam, to capture mosaics of the Orion Nebula in short and long wavelengths of light, revealing unprecedented details and unexpected discoveries.

When astronomers Samuel G. Pearson and Mark J. McCaughrean studied the short-wavelength image of the Orion Nebula, they zoomed in on the Trapezium Cluster, a young star-forming region that’s about 1 million years old, filled to the brim with thousands of new stars. In addition to the stars, the scientists spotted brown dwarfs, which are too small to kick-start the nuclear fusion at their cores to become stars. Brown dwarfs have a mass that is below 7 per cent the mass of the sun.

On the hunt for other low-mass isolated objects, the astronomers found something they had never seen: pairs of planet-like objects with masses between 0.6 and 13 times the mass of Jupiter that appear to defy some fundamental astronomical theories.

The scientists dubbed them Jupiter Mass Binary Objects, or JuMBOs.