The mystery behind the hundreds of strange, floating planets discovered… James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) may be a step closer to a solution.
Many “rogue” planets that lack a parent star lurk in the universe. These free-floating planets (FFPs), including pairs of Jupiter-sized worlds orbiting each other, are mysterious to scientists. But a new study likely rules out one way so-called Jupiter-mass binary objects (JuMBOs) could exist.
Astronomers discovered these objects more than 20 years ago, using the UK's infrared telescope in Hawaii. Since then, observers have spotted and stumbled upon hundreds of these rogue astronomical objects Biggest catch last year. This mass, discovered by the powerful James Webb Space Telescope, consists of more than 500 free-floating planets in the trapezoidal space of the Orion Nebula, a star birth point.
It is worth noting that 80 of these worlds range between 0.7 and 13 times their mass Jupiterformed pairs of planets orbiting each other.
Related: 35 amazing images from the James Webb Space Telescope
These mysterious entities have The astronomy community was puzzled. For one thing, how JuMBOs — and more generally, FFPs — form is a mystery. One idea is that such planets, coupled or otherwise, form when clouds of gas and dust collapse under their own gravity. This is like a miniature version of star formation.
Another hypothesis is that such planets are pulled away from their closely packed planetary systems by the gravitational force of a particularly large body, Like a passing star.
“Astral flight is one method of production [FFPs]”,” Dong LaiThe Cornell University astrophysics professor and senior author of the new study told Live Science via email. In fact, after discovering the mutation last year, another research team calculated JuMBOs were about one-fifth as likely to be pushed away from their parent stars by a passing star as other FFPs.
To learn the process by which massive objects and other icy objects form, Lai and Fang Yuanyu, a student at Shanghai Jiao Tong University in China, created tens of thousands of simulations of a planetary system containing a pair of Jupiter-mass planets orbiting a sun-like star.
In each simulation, the researchers allowed a second star of the same size to swoop in, and they calculated the fraction of simulations in which both planets were ejected from orbit. In all the simulations, Lie and Yu adjusted for several factors, such as the masses of the planets, their relative separation, and the speed of the star flying close to the parent star to see how these factors affect the number of times massive objects are ejected.
They found that massive objects were more likely to form if the planets initially orbited close to each other or if their masses were up to 4 times the mass of Jupiter. But even in the highest probability scenario, the odds of the dual planets being ejected simultaneously were still incredibly low – less than 1%.
In contrast, single planets were typically hundreds of times more likely to be ejected during stellar flybys, creating solitary FFPs. In fact, Lai believes that such stellar visitors may have given birth to the Orion Nebula's FFPs. The simulations also showed that the only surviving orbiters were shaken violently, their initially circular paths deflecting into elliptical paths.
Lai and Yu's results, which have not yet been peer-reviewed, have been submitted to The Astrophysical Journal and are available as a preprint via arXiv.
Lai and Yu believe their research makes the cloud collapse model a more likely explanation for how massive objects form. However, Lai sees the simulations as a type of physics experiment that could help with future observations with telescopes like the telescope. Vera C. Rubin ObservatoryWhich is under construction in Chile.
For example, the results of their simulations will be useful for understanding what happens to planetary systems in dense star clusters and for identifying exotic planetary systems like captured planets, Lai said.
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