Six Mysterious Worlds Spotted in Cosmic Cloud by Webb Telescope

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Astronomers have detected six rogue worlds, or cosmic objects that do not orbit stars, using the James Webb Space Telescope.

The celestial bodies are slightly larger than Jupiter, and the observations shed light on how stars and planets form throughout the universe.

The Webb telescope has taken a look at a star-forming nebula, or cloud of gas and dust, called NGC 1333, located 960 light-years away within a larger cloud of gas and dust called the Perseus Molecular Cloud. Turbulence within the nebula creates knots that collapse under gravity, giving Birth of stars.

The space observatory captured a dramatic, glowing image of the cosmic cloud. While the Hubble Space Telescope Previously taken photos of the cloudDust blocks the view of star formation.

But Webb – which has the ability to observe the universe using infrared light – was able to look directly through the dust.

Inside the nebula are newborn stars, brown dwarfs, and planet-like objects, all about five to ten times more massive than Jupiter. These are the least massive objects yet discovered and were created through a process that typically leads to the formation of stars, which are much more massive than planets, or brown dwarfs—celestial bodies that are neither quite stars nor planets. Brown dwarfs are more massive than planets but not quite as massive as stars.

These results are part of a study accepted for publication in The Astronomical Journal.

“We used Webb’s unprecedented sensitivity at infrared wavelengths to search for the faintest members of a young stellar population, seeking to address a fundamental question in astronomy: How bright can a star-like object form?” said study senior author Ray Jayawardana, a dean and astrophysicist at Johns Hopkins University, in a statement. “It turns out that the smallest free-floating objects that form like stars overlap in mass with giant exoplanets orbiting nearby stars.”

These observations help astronomers better understand the different ways in which stellar objects form.

“We are exploring the limits of star formation,” Adam Langfield, the study’s lead author and an astrophysicist at Johns Hopkins University, said in a statement. “If you have an object like a young Jupiter, is it possible for it to become a star under the right conditions? This is an important context for understanding star and planet formation.”

Stars typically form from clouds of gas and dust. The leftover material from the star’s formation then forms planets. But it’s possible for stellar objects similar to planets to form, the study authors said.

“Our observations confirm that nature produces planetary-mass objects in at least two different ways – from the collapse of a cloud of gas and dust, which is how stars form, and in disks of gas and dust around young stars, as Jupiter did in our solar system,” Jayawardana said.

One of the newly discovered objects is estimated to have a mass equivalent to five Jupiters, or about 1,600 Earth masses. The dusty disk surrounding the object suggests that it may have formed in a similar way to a star. Since disks of gas and dust can give rise to planets, it is possible that a planet-like object could also form “mini” planets.

“These small bodies with masses similar to giant planets may be capable of forming their own planets,” Alex Scholz, an astrophysicist at the University of St Andrews in the United Kingdom and co-author of the study, said in a statement. “This could be a nursery for a miniature planetary system, on a scale much smaller than our own solar system.”

The team used the Webb telescope to study the nebula in detail in infrared light, which is invisible to the human eye, and spotted a rare event: a brown dwarf with a companion body that also has the mass of a planet.

“Such a pair likely formed the way binary star systems do, from a cloud that broke apart as it contracted,” Jayawardana said.
“The diversity of systems produced by nature is astonishing and drives us to improve our models of star and planet formation.”

Astronomers are still trying to glean insights into how free-floating rogue worlds form and evolve. Planet-like objects likely first formed around stars and orbit them, but are being pulled apart by gravitational interactions with other objects.

Rogue planets make up about 10 percent of the nebula objects studied by Webb, but these mysterious objects are still considered rare throughout the Milky Way galaxy.

In the future, the team will use the Webb telescope to study more of these objects to see how they might form their own small planetary systems.

When it launches in May 2027, NASA’s Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope could find hundreds of rogue planets and help astronomers unlock the secrets of these nomadic worlds.