NASA’s James Webb Telescope has made a groundbreaking discovery by detecting objects in space the size of Jupiter. Around 40 pairs of these massive objects, referred to as “JuMBOs,” were found freely drifting in space without being influenced by nearby stars

What are jumbo in astronomy

On the hunt for other low-mass isolated objects, the astronomers found something they had never seen: pairs of planet-like objects with masses between 0.6 and 13 times the mass of Jupiter that appear to defy some fundamental astronomical theories. The scientists dubbed them Jupiter Mass Binary Objects,

Where is James Webb telescope now

The James Webb Space Telescope is not in orbit around the Earth, like the Hubble Space Telescope is – it actually orbits the Sun, 1.5 million kilometers (1 million miles) away from the Earth at what is called the second Lagrange point or L2.

The free-floating entities, which have been named Jupiter-mass binary objects, or Jumbos, appear in spectacular images taken by the James Webb space telescope. The objects are too small to be stars, but also defy the conventional definition of a planet because they are not in orbit around a parent star.

The Jumbos are about 1m years old – babies in astronomical terms – and have infernal surface temperatures of roughly 1,000C. Without a host star, though, they will rapidly cool and will briefly feature temperatures in the range of habitability before becoming incredibly cold. However, as gas giants, their surfaces would not harbour liquid water, even during their brief temperate window, meaning they are not likely to be strong contenders for hosting alien life.

Prof Matthew Bate, the head of astrophysics at the University of Exeter, who was not involved in the research, said: “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,” Bates 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.”

Currently, our best models for how stars and planets form can’t explain these JUMBOs. Even though they’re planet-sized, technically they can’t yet be classified as planets. Future observations might help provide new clues, but in doing so we may need to revise some fairly fundamental models.

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