BY-SRUSHTI SHARMA
A startling finding has been made by researchers at the European Space Agency (ESA) using NASA's James Webb Space Telescope
There are free-floating objects in the Orion Nebula, the area closest to Earth where stars form, that are the size of Jupiter, the largest planet in our solar system.
Our knowledge of how stars and planets are produced has been completely altered by the discovery.
The new findings challenge the conventional wisdom that nebulas, which give birth to stars inside enormous clouds of gas and dust, are not capable of spontaneously producing planet-sized objects.
“There’s something wrong with either our understanding of planet formation, star formation – or both,” a scientist said
The new entities have been called Jupiter Mass Binary Objects, or JuMBOs. They aren’t big enough to be stars, and because they don’t orbit around a star, JuMBOs aren’t technically planets.
JuMBOs are about a million years old, which makes them young relative to the rest of the universe.
Their surface temperatures are roughly 1,000 degrees Celsius (1,800 degrees Fahrenheit).
JuMBOs eventually cool down rapidly and freeze. They’re also largely made up of gas, which means they’re unlikely to be able to support life.