What are JuMBOs, 'Jupiter-sized' objects discovered floating in space?

A number of ‘Jupiter-sized objects’ floating in space have been discovered. These entities, which are said to float freely in space and remain unconnected to any stars, have been named Jupiter Mass Binary Objects – or JuMBOs. The discovery was made by the European Space Agency (ESA) using the powerful James Webb telescope.

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The NASA/ESA/CSA James #Webb Space Telescope has added detailed images of the Orion Nebula to our ESASky application.

Zoom into this region with a rich diversity of phenomena including protostars, brown dwarfs and even free-floating planets! pic.twitter.com/In4FQk8hrX

— European Space Agency (@esa) October 2, 2023

But what are JuMBOs exactly? What do we know about them? Let’s take a closer look: What are they? These objects were found in the famed Orion Nebula, as per Business Standard. The Orion Nebula, which is around 1,500 light-years away, is the closest large star-forming region to Earth. According to BBC, around 40 pairs of these entities were discovered by the ESA. The entities, around the size of Jupiter (the largest planet in our solar system), have not been labelled planets themselves as they do not orbit around a star.

Scientists say the objects form in pairs and not individually.

As per The New York Times, these objects are spaced apart around 200 times the distance between the Earth and the Sun. They orbit each other on routes that take over 20,000 years to complete. As per The Guardian, these objects are thought to be around a million years old – less than a blink of an eye on the cosmic calendar They are said to have surface temperatures of around roughly 1,000 degrees Celsius. However, unlike planets, which can maintain their temperatures by drawing energy from their host stars, these entities cool and then freeze, as per Business Standard. They are also made up mainly of gas and are thus unlikely to support life. The findings, which have been published as a pre-print, are yet to be peer-reviewed. According to BBC, there are a couple of theories about how these entities came to be. Either they formed in Orion Nebula’s regions that did not have enough material to make stars or that they formed around stars and then were ejected into interstellar space. Professor Mark McCaughrean, senior science advisor to the ESA and who led the research team, told the BBC the latter theory is currently in favour with scientists. What do experts say? The discovery has left many scientists scratching their heads. “Gas physics suggests you shouldn’t be able to make objects with the mass of Jupiter on their own, and we know single planets can get kicked out from star systems. But how do you kick out pairs of these things together? Right now, we don’t have an answer. It’s one for the theoreticians,” McCaughrean added. Dr Heidi Hammel, who did not participate in the research, told the BBC her responses to the findings went from “Whaaat?!?’ to ‘Are you sure?" to ‘That’s just so weird!’ to ‘How could binaries be ejected together?’" As Samuel Pearson, an ESA scientist who worked on the research, told The New York Times, “There’s something wrong with either our understanding of planet formation, star formation — or both.”

“They shouldn’t exist,” Pearson added.

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“It’s like kicking a cup of tea across a room and having all the tea land in the teacup,” Pearson said. “And then doing that 42 times.” Hammel told the BBC no current scientific model has predicted the existence of these entities. “But… maybe all star formation regions host these double-Jupiters (and maybe even double-Neptunes and double Earths!), and we just haven’t had a telescope powerful enough to see them before,” she told BBC. Others, meanwhile, can scarcely hold back their excitement about the discovery. Professor Matthew Bate, the head of astrophysics at the University of Exeter, told The Guardian, “I don’t know how to explain the large numbers of objects they’ve seen. It seems we’re missing something in all of the theories we’ve got so far. It seems that there’s a mechanism that’s forming these [objects] that we haven’t thought of yet.” “It’s pretty rare that this kind of discovery is made,” Bate added. “In the last decade, a lot of us thought we understood star formation pretty well. So this is really a very, very surprising result and we’re going to learn a lot from it.” Their existence “implies we may be missing something about how these very low mass objects form,” Bate told The New York Times. Professor Anthony Whitworth, an astrophysicist at Cardiff University, told The Guardian this was “an amazing result”. He hypothesised that these entities could have been moulded within a disc and then been kicked out as a pair. “This would require interactions with other stars in the dense Orion star field. All possible, in principle. Lots to ponder!” Webb — the largest and most powerful astronomical observatory ever launched into space — has been churning out cosmic beauty shots for the past year  and a half. The first pictures from the $10 billion infrared telescope were unveiled last July, six months after its liftoff from French Guiana. It’s considered the successor to the Hubble Space Telescope, orbiting Earth for 33 years. A joint NASA-European Space Agency effort, Webb scans the universe from a more distant perch, 1 million miles (1.6 million kilometers) away. With inputs from agencies