Mysterious ‘rogue’ objects discovered by James Webb telescope may not actually exist, new simulations hint
Mysterious “rogue” pairs of objects of size Jupiter identified by the James Webb space telescope (JWST) are a small fraction of those who were originally formed, suggests a new study. The discovery suggests that these enigmatic entities, nicknamed “Jumbos”, are even rarer than we thought before – and cast doubt about their very existence.
JumbosAbbreviation of “binary objects of Jupiter-Mass”, are pairs of objects of size Jupiter in the shape of a planet which have spotted JWST in the trapezoid region of the Orion nebula cluster In 2023. Each Jumbo includes two gas giants between 0.7 and 30 times the mass of Jupiter. The members of a jumbo are not in orbit; Instead, they swirl around each other at distances of around 25 to 400 astronomical units, making it a free float or a “thug”. (An astronomical unit is around 93 million miles, or 150 million kilometers, the average distance between the earth and the sun.)
The twinned status of objects and their apparent lack of attachment to any star have challenged the existing concepts of the birth of the planets. This did not prevent scientists from floating several ideas on the formation of Jumbo, including that they formed around a star, just like the planets of the solar system, but were jointly Attracted by another star. An alternative hypothesis is that Jumbos are the eroded nuclei of embryonic starssuggesting that they have formed like stars.
However, some researchers are skeptical about the existence of Jumbos. For example, in 2024, Kevin LuhmanProfessor in the Penn State astronomy and astrophysics department, reanalyzed JWST observations and suggested that the alleged pairs are not planets after all. Instead, he proposed that it was distant substantive objects that had been fortuitously captured in the snapshots of JWST of the nebula of Orion.
Actually, Richard ParkerA lecturer in astrophysics at the University of Sheffield in the United Kingdom and the main author of the new study, told Live Science via an e-mail that it was a discussion on the work of Luhman who prompted the new study. During this group meeting, Simon GoodwinProfessor of theoretical astrophysics at the University of Sheffield and to the second author of the new study, suggested that simulations could help identify sensitivity to jumbos sensitive to destruction. Indeed, no previous research had examined how long these planetary pairs persist in the interstellar space. Such environments are full of growing stars that could fragment duos via their powerful gravitational tractions.
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To determine the effectiveness of Jumbos tolerated the turbulence of their birth environment, Parker, Goodwin and Jessica DiamondA master’s degree integrated in the University of Sheffield, created a computer model of a nebula containing a mixture of stars and jumbos which totaled 1,500 components, in an arrangement that probably imitated the original composition of Orion Nebula Cloud, explained Parker.
The researchers then generated five copies of this model which differ in various internal parameters, such as the distance between the members of a given planetary duo and the way in which the nebula was global. For each model copy, the team made 10 cycles of n body simulations N.
“These computer simulations calculate the force due to severity on each object of all other objects,” said Parker, adding that such calculations, carried out several times, can reveal how the different components of the model of the model interact over time.
The researchers found that the simulated jumbos were extremely ephemeral. In a dense nebula, for example, almost 90% of planet pairs were destroyed by neighboring stars in a million years. Even in the best of cases – when there were fewer stars overall in the nebula and the jumbos were worth in tighter orbits – only half of the planet pairs resisted any disturbance. The analyzes also revealed that the more a pair of planets was largely separated, the more it would be disturbed.
Parker said that since he and his colleagues had previously found That the star-stars systems are very fragile in the environments that are picked up from the stars, it was not particularly surprised by the results, noting that “[b]Handcrafted the binaries of planet-planet are less massive, they have a lower energy and are even more sensitive to destruction. “”
The results, published on May 2 in the journal Monthly opinion from the Royal Astronomical Society: LettersShow that the observed jumbos are extremely rare. But Parker said that it alludes to the same disturbing possibility proposed by Luhman: that they do not really exist. Indeed, to explain the jumbo numbers detected by JWST, the pairs of planet should have been produced in much larger numbers than it was currently thinking. According to Parker, this result probably adds support for the interpretation of jumbos as background noise.
“I think the next steps are for someone else to take the original JWST data and analyze it again,” he added.
