• Email Us: [email protected]
  • Contact Us: +1 718 874 1545
  • Skip to main content
  • Skip to primary sidebar

Medical Market Report

  • Home
  • All Reports
  • About Us
  • Contact Us

Failed Stars Might Be Able To Form Planets, Cosmic First Observations Suggest

October 31, 2024 by Deborah Bloomfield

Nature loves to break the neat little boxes we use to classify stuff. In astronomy, one of these box breakers is brown dwarfs. These objects have both stellar and planetary qualities, existing on the cusp of both. New research continues to blur the line and the latest observations are no different. Brown dwarfs in the Orion Nebula seem to possess a protoplanetary disk.

Brown dwarfs can be as light as 13 times the mass of Jupiter (probably even lighter). They form like stars but have clouds. They are simply not heavy enough to start nuclear fusion in their interior and for that reason, they will never shine like a star.

Advertisement

Still, their starlike formation might allow them to get a disk of material around them. Decades ago, Hubble was used to find these disks within the Orion Nebula. In particular, it focused on proplyds, the protoplanetary disks illuminated by the ultraviolet light of the brightest and most massive stars in the nebula. The quest now was to find more around the smallest stellar objects.  

“Stars are born within massive clouds of gas and dust in space that can be light years across, which are called nebulae,” co-lead author Kevin Luhman, professor of astronomy at Penn State, said in a statement. “For decades, astronomers suspected that soon after a star coalesces within a nebula, planets are born within a disk of gas and dust surrounding the newborn star, known as a protoplanetary disk.”

“Some of the objects born in nebulae like Orion have masses that are too small for them to undergo hydrogen fusion, so they are cool and faint and do not qualify as full-fledged stars,” added co-lead author Catarina Alves de Oliveira, head of the Science Operations Development Division at the European Space Agency. “These star-like bodies that lack fusion are known as brown dwarfs. The question is, can we find proplyds around any of the brown dwarfs in Orion?”

The observations conducted by JWST highlighted 20 likely and two borderline brown dwarfs with suspected proplyds. The smallest of them was just five times the mass of Jupiter. Two of the candidates were already identified as proplyds by Hubble and the JWST observations suggest that they are the coolest and least massive known protoplanetary disks.

Advertisement

The observations provide important clues about the nature of brown dwarfs and how they relate to both stars and planets. However, more observations are necessary to fully fill in the gaps in our knowledge of these objects. In the Orion Nebula, JWST has discovered other peculiar substellar objects called JuMBOs.

A paper on this discovery is available on arXiv ahead of its publication in The Astrophysical Journal.

Deborah Bloomfield
Deborah Bloomfield

Related posts:

  1. U.S. weekly jobless claims unexpectedly increase
  2. UK firms raise their inflation expectations – BoE survey
  3. Roman Military Camps In Arabia Spotted Using Google Earth, Suggesting Desert Conquest
  4. 380-Million-Year-Old Fanged Fish Found In One Of The World’s Oldest Lakes

Source Link: Failed Stars Might Be Able To Form Planets, Cosmic First Observations Suggest

Filed Under: News

Primary Sidebar

  • Project Hail Mary Trailer First Look: What Would Happen If The Sun Got Darker?
  • Newly Discovered Cell Structure Might Hold Key To Understanding Devastating Genetic Disorders
  • What Is Kakeya’s Needle Problem, And Why Do We Want To Solve It?
  • “I Wasn’t Prepared For The Sheer Number Of Them”: Cave Of Mummified Never-Before-Seen Eyeless Invertebrates Amazes Scientists
  • Asteroid Day At 10: How The World Is More Prepared Than Ever To Face Celestial Threats
  • What Happened When A New Zealand Man Fell Butt-First Onto A Powerful Air Hose
  • Ancient DNA Confirms Women’s Unexpected Status In One Of The Oldest Known Neolithic Settlements
  • Earth’s Weather Satellites Catch Cloud Changes… On Venus
  • Scientists Find Common Factors In People Who Have “Out-Of-Body” Experiences
  • Shocking Photos Reveal Extent Of Overfishing’s Impact On “Shrinking” Cod
  • Direct Fusion Drive Could Take Us To Sedna During Its Closest Approach In 11,000 Years
  • Earth’s Energy Imbalance Is More Than Double What It Should Be – And We Don’t Know Why
  • We May Have Misjudged A Fundamental Fact About The Cambrian Explosion
  • The Shoebill Is A Bird So Bizarre That Some People Don’t Even Believe It’s Real
  • Colossal’s “Dire Wolves” Are Now 6 Months Old – And They’ve Doubled In Size
  • How To Fake A Fossil: Find Out More In Issue 36 Of CURIOUS – Out Now
  • Is It True Earth Used To Take 420 Days To Orbit The Sun?
  • One Of The Ocean’s “Most Valuable Habitats” Grows The Only Flowers Known To Bloom In Seawater
  • World’s Largest Digital Camera Snaps 2,104 New Asteroids In 10 Hours, Mice With 2 Dads Father Their Own Offspring, And Much More This Week
  • Simplest Explanation For “Anomalous” Signals Coming From Underneath Antarctica Ruled Out
  • Business
  • Health
  • News
  • Science
  • Technology
  • +1 718 874 1545
  • +91 78878 22626
  • [email protected]
Office Address
Prudour Pvt. Ltd. 420 Lexington Avenue Suite 300 New York City, NY 10170.

Powered by Prudour Network

Copyrights © 2025 · Medical Market Report. All Rights Reserved.

Go to mobile version