The James Webb Space Telescope has snapped a baby photo of six Jupiter-sized worlds.
These newborn objects are cradled in a stellar nursery some 1,000 light-years away. And the tiniest among them is swaddled in a dusty disk that might someday form moons. Such detailed views of distant infant worlds could provide new insights into how stars and planets form.
Researchers shared the findings September 27 in The Astronomical Journal.
Stars form when pockets of material in huge clouds of gas and dust collapse under their own weight. The same process can also create brown dwarfs. These are oddball objects bigger than planets but smaller than stars.
The newfound objects are brown dwarfs in a young star cluster called NGC1333. It resides in the constellation Perseus. These six worlds all have masses between five and 15 times that of Jupiter.
The dusty disk around the smallest world is just like the kind that circles baby stars and gives rise to planets. This disk might one day turn into a pack of moons orbiting the brown dwarf, says Adam Langeveld. He’s an astrophysicist at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Md., who led the research.
The littlest brown dwarf that Langeveld and his colleagues turned up here may be the lightest such object that can form like a star. At least, that may be the case in this specific star cluster. Given the similarities between how stars and brown dwarfs can form, “we’re really probing the limit of the star-formation process,” Langeveld says.
Future work will use the James Webb telescope to look at the chemical makeup of the newborn worlds and the surrounding material. Those observations may help explain what types of celestial objects can form in this environment.
