- 4203 - FREE FLOATING PLANETS? Hundreds of Free-Floating Planets have been found in the Orion Nebula. It appears that rogue planets, free floating worlds that aren’t gravitationally bound to a parent star, might be more common than we thought. The James Webb Space Telescope have revealed 540 planetary-mass objects in the Orion Nebula and Trapezium Cluster.
--------------------- 4203 - FREE FLOATING PLANETS?
- This discovery
would be by far the largest sample of rogue planets ever discovered. Last year, astronomers found 70 free floating
worlds throughout the Milky Way. A
near-infrared survey from JWST allowed astronomers to discover and characterize
a large sample of 540 planetary-mass candidates.
-
- The team says these
planetary mass objects (PMOs) are too small to be stars, as their masses are
well below the traditional cutoff for a deuterium-burning brown dwarf, even
down to 0.6 Jupiter mass, not much more massive than Saturn.
-
- Within the large
group of rogue planets are 42 pairs of planets that are gravitationally bound
together, something that’s never been observed before. The astronomers named
them Jupiter Mass Binary Objects, or JuMBOs.
-
- How pairs of young
planets can be ejected simultaneously and remain bound, weakly at relatively
wide separations, remains quite unclear.
-
- The Jupiter Mass
Binary Objects or JuMBOs are a really big discovery. The conventional definition of a planet is
that it is in orbit around a star. Additionally, current theories of planetary
formation suggest that Jupiter-sized objects can only be formed through the
process that gives rise to stars inside the clouds of dust and gas found in a
nebula.
-
- How can a
substantial population of objects form below 5 Jupter masses and how a
significant fraction of them can end up in multiple systems?. The exact mechanisms for how planets go
“rogue” are unknown.
-
- The theories
include that planets are pulled away from one star by gravitational
interactions with other passing stars, or that supernovae kick them out, or
that they free float into space after their sun dies. Alternatively planetary ejections can be
caused through planets scattering in a planetary disk or by dynamical
interactions between stars.
-
- Rogue planets are
usually impossible to image in visible light, which makes JWST’s sensitive
infrared vision the perfect tool to look for them.
-
- The Orion Nebula
has been studied for decades to observe the formation and early evolution of
stars and other celestial objects. It lies 1,350 light years away from Earth
and is visible to the naked eye as a misty smudge at the bottom of the Orion
constellation, part of the ‘sword’ of the mythical Greek hunter after whom the
constellation is named.
-
-
October 27, 2023 FREE FLOATING
PLANETS 4300
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Monday, October 30, 2023 ---------------------------------
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