A JuMBO Discovery Might Alter Our Understanding of Planetary Formation Forever

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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 the distance between the Sun and Neptune, the farthest of the major planets. 

So what exactly are these cosmic JuMBOs?

As the name already indicates, they are planetary-mass objects with masses not exceeding 13 Jupiters. That means JuMBOs can’t be binary brown dwarfs—those are already very rare—which are essentially failed stars, intermediate between planets and stars. 

They consist of carbon monoxide, methane, and steam, reaching up to 700 degrees Celsius in temperature. 

40 JuMBOs have been found in the Orion Nebula’s Trapezium Cluster alone; that is a lot for something that shouldn’t exist in theory. Shouldn’t because no theory of planetary formation can account for their existence. 

We have the best resources to study planetary formation right at home. Our planets and asteroids reveal a lot to us about the Solar System’s early days. The problem is that just because our Solar System developed a certain way doesn’t mean that all planets take the same route—exoplanet discoveries have taught us enough about the universal diversity of planets. 

This photo shows the Protoplanetary disk of HL Tauri, a young star with planets in the making; Source: Wikipedia
Basically, planets form from the protoplanetary disk that surrounds a young star. This is a disk of swirling material that eventually clumps up to form planets; it’s the way our Earth came into existence, as well as everything else we see today. 

However, planetary formation is chaotic and that’s why we see hot Jupiters—Jupiter-like planets orbiting much closer to their star than even Mercury—and orbits that change over time. 

Indeed, it was during this chaotic time in our Solar System that astronomers believe a Mars-sized object collided with our Earth to create our Moon. 

Any planet that comes into formation is the child of a star. Even rogue planets. 

Rogue planets aren’t bound to any stars; they are free floating objects, traversing the empty regions of interstellar space by themselves. In the Milky Way alone, there might be billions of these rogue planets. So what happened to them?

Planets can be ejected from their home system if their orbits are unstable or via a close encounter with another star. The latter isn’t even unlikely, as usually stars are born in clusters; clusters like these disperse as short-lived stars die and older stars move away. And in this chaotic place, it’s only likely that some planets have their orbits distorted—or that they are entirely ripped away. 

Artist's impression of a rogue planet; Source: Wikipedia
But can that also be true of JuMBOs? 

Most planets that are ejected are solo. And yet we have evidence of dozens of pairs of planetary-mass objects in a small region within the Orion Nebula. A classic scenario of a binary rogue system can therefore not apply for JuMBOs. 

They can’t be stars and are unlikely to be brown dwarfs either. 

At the same time, they couldn’t have formed the same way our planets did. 

Since these binary planets are adamantely holding together, it’s impossible that they were ejected from their home star—the process would have torn the planets apart a long time ago. 

The only possibility is that they come from dense clusters of stars; simulations by astronomers show that in such a scenario, JuMBOs could be fairly common occurrences. 

Another idea is that these JuMBOs are an entirely new category of sub-stellar objects, and that they form the same way stars do—not from the leftover dust of star formation but from the material residing in molecular clouds where stars themselves are born. 

JuMBOs are weird. And many are unsure about them. We don’t know what they are, and some even believe that they don’t exist—that the data is just corrupted by the immense dust and gas obscuring the Orion Nebula. 

Whatever they are, they are out there. Waiting for an answer. 

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