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23/10/2023

Discovery of 40 jumbo planets in the Orion Nebula

A surprising find of free-floating pairs of planets has been made with images taken by the James Webb Space Telescope. These planets are as massive as Jupiter.

Credit: NASA, ESA, M. Robberto (Space Telescope Science Institute/ESA) and the Hubble Space Telescope Orion Treasury Project Team

In the mosaic taken – consisting of more than 3,000 individual images – 40 individual planets without a parent star were discovered. It is true that free-floating planets have been discovered in the Orion Nebula before. But these candidates are particularly massive planets – so-called Jumbos (Jupiter Mass Binary Objects). The find is surprising because these objects appear to occur as pairs.

It is unclear among astronomical experts whether jumbo planets and other floating planets previously formed in a planetary system and were snatched away from this planetary system by the gravity of a nearby passing star. Or are they even failed stars?

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