Far out cosmology: JWST sees free floating stuff everywhere (Introduction)

by David Turell , Monday, November 13, 2023, 21:29 (165 days ago) @ David Turell

Not in solar systems:

https://www.quantamagazine.org/rogue-worlds-throw-planetary-ideas-out-of-orbit-20231113/

“'When we look at the solar system it’s all nice and neat. You get the sun, and you get planets,” said Samuel Pearson, an astronomer with the European Space Agency (ESA). There’s nothing in the middle. But “when you actually go and have a look,” Pearson said, “you realize there’s a full spectrum of [objects with] basically every mass in between.”

"The JWST observation bolsters a growing catalog of isolated objects occupying this gray zone between giant planets and tiny stars. Sometimes called “free-floating” or “rogue” planets, these solitary worlds drift freely through space. While astronomers can estimate the mass of these dark, Jupiter-mass balls of gas, their origins remain mysterious. Are they actually planets — “Jupiters” that once orbited stars but were somehow spit out? Or are they more like micro-stars that failed to ignite?

"Rather than answering this question, the JWST observation adds to the mystery: The telescope’s infrared eye found that dozens of the worlds appear to be in pairs orbiting each other — a puzzling arrangement that, if confirmed, would defy expectations.

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"improbable duos cannot be easily explained by any known formation theories of either stars or free-floating planets. But within a week of the JWST announcement, researchers published a daring new idea describing how giant planets might be ejected from their home system in pairs — an event most researchers had thought all but impossible. Whether or not the proposal can fully account for the entire zoo of dim, starless worlds remains to be seen. But researchers expect that a refined understanding of free-floating worlds, and the star systems that create them, is at hand.

“'If indeed [this discovery] is confirmed,” said Peter Plavchan, an astrophysicist at George Mason University who was not involved in detecting the pairs of Jupiters, “it will truly be groundbreaking.”

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"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’t be stars either, since many of them weighed as little as a single Jupiter — 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 posted on October 2.

"The JUMBOs caught experts in both star and planet formation flat-footed. “This 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,” said Matthew Bate, an astrophysicist at the University of Exeter specializing in star formation.

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"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.

“'Once you’ve got spectra,” Pearson said, “there’s basically no place to hide.'”

Comment: the universe gets more mysterious and complex the deeper we can look. This will delight dhw who always questions God's works. Why create this mass of independent objects if all God wanted was us on Earth? dhw's puny brain against God's. God works in mysterious ways, doesn't HE?