Abha Jain is a freelance science writer. She did a masters degree in biology, specializing in neuroscience, from the Indian Institute of Science, Bengaluru, India, and is almost through with a bachelor's degree in archaeology from the University of Leicester, UK.
The mystery behind hundreds of strange, free-floating planets detected by the James Webb Space Telescope may be a step closer to being solved.
Notably, 80 of these worlds, which are between 0.7 and 13 times the mass of Jupiter, formed pairs of planets that orbit each other.These enigmatic entities have puzzled the astronomy community. For one thing, exactly how JuMBOs — and more generally, FFPs — form is a mystery. One idea is that such planets, paired or otherwise, form when clouds of gas and dust collapse under their own gravity. That's like a scaled-down version of star formation.
By submitting your information you agree to the Terms & Conditions and Privacy Policy and are aged 16 or over."Stellar flyby is one of the ways to produce ," Dong Lai, a professor of astrophysics at Cornell University and senior author of the new study, told Live Science by email. In fact, following the discovery bonanza last year, another research team calculated that JuMBOs were about one-fifth as likely as other FFPs to be scooped away from their parent stars by a passing star.
They found that JuMBOs were more likely to form if the planets were initially orbiting close to each other or if they were up to 4 times as massive as Jupiter. But even in the highest-probability scenario, the odds of paired planets being kicked out simultaneously was still incredibly low — less than 1%.
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