wp-plugin-hostgator domain was triggered too early. This is usually an indicator for some code in the plugin or theme running too early. Translations should be loaded at the init action or later. Please see Debugging in WordPress for more information. (This message was added in version 6.7.0.) in /home4/scienrds/scienceandnerds/wp-includes/functions.php on line 6114ol-scrapes domain was triggered too early. This is usually an indicator for some code in the plugin or theme running too early. Translations should be loaded at the init action or later. Please see Debugging in WordPress for more information. (This message was added in version 6.7.0.) in /home4/scienrds/scienceandnerds/wp-includes/functions.php on line 6114Source:https:\/\/www.quantamagazine.org\/rogue-worlds-throw-planetary-ideas-out-of-orbit-20231113\/#comments<\/a><\/br> It took Pearson months to align the resulting 12,500 JWST images of the Orion nebula<\/a>, pixel by pixel. The formidable task was frustrated by the telescope\u2019s exquisite sensitivity: Many of the faint objects typically used as landmarks blinded JWST\u2019s ultra-sensitive eye.<\/p>\n \u201cThe brown dwarfs that are normally difficult to see were wiping out bits of the detector,\u201d he said. It was \u201cjust not a problem I\u2019ve ever encountered with any other telescope.\u201d<\/p>\n After completing the cosmic mosaic, Pearson was rewarded with an abundance of the mysterious worlds he sought: More than 500 free-floating objects of a few Jupiter masses speckled the Orion nebula. But the real surprise was that, when he looked closely, he saw something that initially didn\u2019t make much sense. Some of the blobs of light were pairs of Jupiter-mass objects. In all, he counted 42 pairs of whirling Jupiters \u2014 a striking number.<\/p>\n \u201cHang on, why is there all this faint stuff in pairs?\u201d Pearson recalled wondering. \u201cThen the penny dropped, and we realized we should look at this very carefully.\u201d<\/p>\n From a theoretical perspective, these duos seemed nearly impossible. They were unlikely to be punted planets; when one planet kicks another out of a stellar system, the ejected planet almost always flies off alone. But they couldn\u2019t be stars either, since many of them weighed as little as a single Jupiter \u2014 a mass too light for the object to have formed directly from a collapsing gas cloud. The team dubbed their mystery duos Jupiter Mass Binary Objects, or JUMBOs for short, and described them in a preprint<\/a> posted on October 2.<\/p>\n The JUMBOs caught experts in both star and planet formation flat-footed. \u201cThis has not been predicted at all. There are no existing theories where we would have expected these wide, free-floating planetary objects in these numbers,\u201d said Matthew Bate<\/a>, an astrophysicist at the University of Exeter specializing in star formation.<\/p>\n Astronomers had previously observed that although many massive stars twirl through space with partners, the percentage of coupled-off stars falls with their mass. \u201cWe usually expect trends to continue,\u201d van der Marel said. Thus, she said, the percentage of Jupiter-mass objects in pairs \u201cshould go to zero.\u201d Leaping up to 10% hadn\u2019t been on anyone\u2019s JWST bingo card.<\/p>\n The catch is that at least some of the JUMBOs are probably mirages. The deeper an object lies in a dusty environment (and the Orion nebula is extremely dusty), the tougher it is to distinguish it from a distant, more massive star behind the nebula, which would be expected to have a partner. In previous studies, between 20% and 80% of what looked like free-floating worlds turned out to be vanilla stars. \u201cOne needs to be a bit cautious at the moment,\u201d Miret Roig said.<\/p>\n In the spring, Pearson and McCaughrean will use JWST to again observe their batch of free-floating worlds, this time in a richer spectrum of colors. These follow-up observations will help confirm which JUMBOs are real by looking for traces of methane or water in their atmospheres, a telltale signature of Jupiter-mass worlds.<\/p>\n \u201cOnce you\u2019ve got spectra,\u201d Pearson said, \u201cthere\u2019s basically no place to hide.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n Even without confirmation, theorists are already racing to explain these perplexing worlds.<\/p>\n Rosalba Perna<\/a>, an astrophysicist at Stony Brook University, heard about Orion\u2019s JUMBOs in the news, before she even read Pearson\u2019s paper. Perna and Yihan Wang<\/a> of the University of Nevada, Las Vegas had been studying what happens when a star flies past another solar system. They had focused mainly on simulating systems with a single giant planet. But the JUMBOs got Perna wondering: What if there were two giant planets? She called up Wang and asked him to see what would happen if he stuck a second Jupiter into the simulations.<\/p>\n Wang set up his program to hurl digital stars at countless two-Jupiter stellar systems from all angles. He also set up the software to notify him if the \u201cintruder\u201d star sent both planets careening off into space together \u2014 creating a JUMBO. Then he sent the code off to a computing cluster at his university and went to lunch.<\/p>\n When Wang returned to his office and checked his computer, he found a list of alerts reading \u201cbinary planet formed!!!\u201d<\/p>\n From tens of billions of simulations, the team saw that booting pairs of Jupiters was relatively easy if the planets happened to be quite close together when the marauding star swept by. This happened especially often for neighbors with tightly spaced orbits (think Uranus and Neptune). In such cases, up to 20 out of 100 ejections produced JUMBOs (the other 80 produced single planets) \u2014 more than enough to account for the 10% rate Pearson had seen in Orion. But for planets with more distantly spaced orbits (think Jupiter-Neptune), almost all ejections resulted in lone planets.<\/p>\n With input from Wang\u2019s colleague Zhaohuan Zhu<\/a>, the group worked around the clock (and in one case during a flight to Europe). The trio wrote up their results and posted a preprint<\/a> on October 9, one week after the JUMBO find.<\/p>\n \u201cThe speed at which they wrote that is slightly frightening,\u201d Pearson said.<\/p>\n Other theoretical astrophysicists have yet to fully digest the new results, but they find them plausible \u2014 and surprising. \u201cI didn\u2019t think [making a free-floating pair of planets] was possible to do from an ejection point of view,\u201d Raymond said. \u201cBut then this paper came out.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n <\/br><\/br><\/br><\/p>\n
\nRogue Worlds Throw Planetary Ideas Out of Orbit<\/br>
\n2023-11-14 21:58:05<\/br><\/p>\nSpeedy Simulations<\/strong><\/h2>\n