A JuMBO Discovery Might Alter Our Understanding of Planetary Formation Forever
Strange planetary-mass objects in the Orion Nebula challenge current planetary formation models. Have we misunderstood the way planets are born all this time? This JWST shows one of the dozens of JuMBOs in the Orion Nebula; Source: EarthSky The Orion Nebula—along with the constellation it belongs to, it’s probably one of the most famous objects in the night sky. Despite its distance of more than 1’300 light-years, the Orion Nebula’s fuzzy appearance is even visible from light-polluted cities. And it keeps revealing new secrets to us. One of the latest mysteries has received the name JuMBO, standing for Jupiter-mass binary objects. Astronomers discovered them with the help of the James Webb Space Telescope. What makes these objects so curious is that they’re unlike anything we’ve seen before—they aren’t bound to any star, just orbiting each other at a distance of up to 390 Astronomical Units (AU). That is 390 times the distance between the Sun and Earth, and 13 times ...