Sometimes planets go haywire.
Scientists have used the powerful James Webb Space Telescope to discover six nomadic objects that have broken away from our solar system and are moving through space. They’re a little bigger than the gas giant Jupiter, and their discovery suggests that these worlds formed in a way that’s more similar to how stars are formed, rather than the way planets usually form.
Astronomers have hoped for years to spot such floating objects, using the Webb Telescope’s ability to collect large amounts of faint, distant light with its large mirror.
“This has been planned for a decade,” Ray Jayawardene, an astronomer at Johns Hopkins University and lead author of the study, told Mashable.
A NASA scientist saw the first Voyager images, and he was horrified by what he saw.
In the image below, you can see three rogue planets circled in green. They are located 1,000 light-years away from our galaxy in the NGC1333 nebula, a huge region of dust and gas where stars form.
“This has been planned for 10 years.”
While it’s possible that it originally formed as a planet around a star, researchers believe it’s more likely that it didn’t begin life as a star, but would have had nearly the mass needed to ignite a stellar engine like our sun. (Stars form when huge clouds of gas collapse and heat up, eventually creating the immense pressure and heat needed to form a star.) The lowest-mass object found is about five times the mass of Jupiter and shows evidence of a dusty disk around it – cosmic dust often revolves around a central object during star formation. Moreover, it’s unlikely that a planet ejected from our solar system would have maintained such a disk.
“These objects likely formed in a similar way to how stars form,” Rajawardena said.
This study Astronomical Journala peer-reviewed scientific record.
Mashable Lightspeed
The green circles indicate three parabolic planets recently observed in the nebula NGC1333.
Credit: European Space Agency
These rogue objects are similar in mass to other large gas giants outside our solar system (called exoplanets), and if they weren’t failed stars, they would have had to be ejected from the solar system, perhaps by a close gravitational interaction with another planet or a second star (most solar systems have more than one star).
The search for irregular objects continues. Astronomers have been given more time to use the Webb Telescope to observe such objects with dust disks. Could they be “dwarf planet” systems like the many strange moons orbiting Saturn and Jupiter? As we know from our solar system, these planetary systems contain interesting moons, some of which harbor oceans under their icy shells.
Bonus Sightings: Though not part of this study, the Webb image above shows clear evidence of a newly formed solar system. Look at the bottom right, below the black bar. You can see two dark cones radiating from a bright central point. This is Webb. From our position in the Milky Way galaxy, we are looking at the solar system’s dusty disk from the side, much like looking at the side of a Frisbee. The newborn system’s dusty disk blocks starlight, creating two dark flares.
The Webb Telescope’s Powerful Capabilities
The Webb Telescope is a scientific collaboration between NASA, ESA and the Canadian Space Agency, designed to peer into the deepest depths of space and reveal new insights into the early universe. But it’s not just the planets and moons of our solar system, it’s also observing intriguing planets in our galaxy.
Here’s how Webb achieved this unparalleled feat and will likely continue to do so for decades to come.
– Giant Mirror: Webb’s mirror will capture light, but it’s more than 21 feet in diameter, more than 2.5 times larger than the Hubble Space Telescope’s mirror. By capturing more light, Webb can see more distant and ancient objects. As mentioned above, the telescope will peer into stars and galaxies that formed more than 13 billion years ago, just a few hundred million years after the Big Bang. “We’ll be looking at the first stars and galaxies that formed in history,” Gene Clayton, an astronomer and director of the Manfred Olson Planetarium at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, told Mashable in 2021.
– Infrared view: While the Hubble Telescope primarily sees light visible to our eyes, the Webb Telescope is primarily an infrared telescope, meaning it sees light in the infrared spectrum. This allows us to see a much wider range of the universe. Because infrared light has a longer wavelength than visible light, light waves pass through cosmic clouds more efficiently; the light doesn’t collide with and get scattered as often by these dense particles. Ultimately, the Webb Telescope’s infrared vision can reach places the Hubble Telescope can’t.
“It lifts the veil,” Clayton said.
– Peeking into distant exoplanets: Webb Telescope It is equipped with a special instrument called a spectrometer. This instrument will revolutionize our understanding of these far-away worlds. It will be able to decipher what molecules (such as water, carbon dioxide, and methane) are present in the atmospheres of far-away exoplanets, including gas giants and small rocky planets. Webb will be observing exoplanets in our Milky Way galaxy. Who knows what we’ll find?
“We may learn things we’ve never thought about before,” Mercedes Lopez Morales, an exoplanet researcher and astrophysicist at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, told Mashable in 2021.
Astronomers have already managed to discover intriguing chemical reactions on a planet 700 light-years away, and have begun searching for Earth-sized rocky planets in the TRAPPIST solar system, one of the most promising places in the universe.
