This year, scientists received an unexpected Christmas gift: a potential solution to the mystery of JuMBOs, strange objects that don’t appear to be planets or stars. Try adding a bow on top!
The gift comes courtesy of a team of researchers who believe the mysterious Large MBO (Jupiter-mass binary objects) are actually stellar cores that are violently “opened” by massive and powerful stars, like children excitedly opening presents at Christmas. This may solve a mystery that arises in 2023.
astronomers use James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) 42 pairs of such free-floating planetary-mass objects discovered in space Orion Nebula. They are confused because they have no connection with the star yet somehow manage to remain in a binary star pair. This suggests that JuMBOs didn’t form like planets or stars, which creates quite a puzzle.
The team, led by Richard Parker and undergraduate Jessica Diamond at the University of Sheffield, came up with the idea to explain the formation of JuMBO, by revisiting an old idea to explain the new phenomenon.
The theory revolves around “light erosion,” a process in which massive, violent stars (O- or B-type stellar objects) bombard other stars with high-energy radiation, stripping away their outer layers. This idea fits because the star-forming Orion Nebula is filled with hot, massive OB stars.
“We’re using a pretty old idea – the radiation from massive stars is so intense that it erodes the ‘core’ of gas that eventually forms the star,” Parker told Space.com. “The radiation removes some material from the core, reducing its mass, but also compresses the remaining material, effectively forming a low-mass object.”
The team reviewed a paper published 20 years ago and used the idea that stars typically form in binary system The photoerosion framework is then applied to demonstrate that stellar binaries can be photoeroded to form JuMBO pairs.
“I think JuMBO is a star and brown dwarf – They would have been like stars if it weren’t for the radiation from more massive stars, which shaped them to be more like brown dwarfs,” Parker continued.
This adds another celestial body to the mix of JuMBO, so before going any further, let’s go back, like the Ghost of Christmas Eve in Charles Deacon’s classic “A Christmas Carol,” to 2023, when JuMBO was first discovered, and see How they challenge categorization.
“Brown Dwarf, Planet or Star” JuMBO plays guessing game with astronomers
As mentioned above, the biggest mystery about JuMBOs is that they appear to defy the formation pathways that lead to both Star and planet.
The quality of JuMBO is equivalent to Jupiterso this might immediately indicate that they, like planets, formed from rings of gas and dust surrounding newborn stars. However, the JuMBO pairs found in the Orion Nebula are not associated with stars.
This is explainable. Planets often “go gangster” and were expelled from the planetary system through gravitational interactions with passing “invader stars” and even through interactions with their own planetary siblings.
The problem with this idea of explaining JuMBO is the energy required to eject two planets from around their star should It will also cause their binary arrangement to be destroyed. However, JuMBO still exists in binary archives.
Of course, it’s reasonable that some freak event could cause a pair of planets to be ejected without splitting them apart. However, astronomers did not find one or two pairs of JuMBOs in Orion; they found 42 in a relatively small corner Milky Way! This suggests that nothing that happened was a strange incident.
So why do astronomers think JuMBOs don’t form like stars? It all depends on their crowd.
Stars are born when overdense patches in huge clouds of gas and dust grow and collapse under their own gravity. This gave birth to a protostar It continues to collect material from its prenatal cocoon of gas and dust. Typically, these protostars gather enough mass to create pressure and temperature in their cores that fuse hydrogen into helium, the nuclear process that defines what a nuclear process is. main sequence star yes.
As Parker points out, many stars are born with binary partners from the same cloud and become binaries. It is estimated that about half of all well-known celebrities have such partnerships. Mystery solved, right? Wrong!
That’s the problem.
The more massive a star is, the more likely it is to form a binary star. About 75% of the most massive stars have partners. For stars as massive as our Sun, this number drops to around 50%, and continues to drop as mass decreases. This means that the chance of finding a star with binary mass is almost zero.
Remember, JWST discovered 42 pairs of JuMBOs in just one nebula. Again, this suggests that what happened here wasn’t just a fluke.
JuMBO is not a thief at all.
In Parker and Diamond’s theory, JuMBOs do form like stars, but they start out with enough mass for them to reside in binaries. Then came other more violent radiation blasts massive stars So much mass was eroded away that the planet-mass JuMBO was left.
“This eliminates the need for JuMBOs to form massive planets and somehow be ejected from their parent stars as binary pairs,” Parker said. “They’re not really ‘rogues.’ In our view, if they don’t come from nearby The extreme radiation from massive stars (of which there are several in Orion), JuMBO may form a normal and common binary star system.
He added that the theory also rules out the need for JuMBOs to form as brown dwarfs, with very unconventional orbital separations from their binary partners that are not observed anywhere else in the universe.
The brown dwarfs Parker mentioned are objects that formed like stars, but in their protostar stage they were unable to gather enough mass to trigger the fusion of hydrogen and helium. For this reason, brown dwarfs are often given the somewhat unfair nickname “failed stars”.
Their mass is about 10 to 80 times Jupiter’sabout 0.01 to 0.08 times the mass of the sun. As expected for these small masses, brown dwarfs are rarely found in binaries.
“I think JuMBOs are a hybrid of stars and brown dwarfs – they would be like stars without the radiation from more massive stars, which shapes them to be more like brown dwarfs.”
Parker explained that to test his and Diamond’s idea, astronomers need to look for JuMBOs in other star-forming regions filled with massive stars. If they are correct, then the more intense the radiation from these stars, the smaller the JuMBOs found near them should be!
“Thus, JuMBOs should be less massive in regions with a large number of massive stars,” he continued. “Alternatively, if we discovered a JuMBO in a region where there is no radiation from massive stars, that would immediately rule us out!”
Parker thinks astronomers may have to move quickly to study these JuMBOs in Orion. But if he and Diamond are right, don’t worry – there will be a new JuMBO coming soon.
“I’ve been calculating whether JuMBO could survive in a crowded environment like the Orion Nebula for a long time,” he said. “It seems like a lot of it is destroyed, which means something more needs to be formed than what’s observed to explain the observations.”
If astronomers wanted a Christmas present for Parker and Diamond’s theory, the University of Sheffield researcher has a surprise in store. That really sums up his attitude toward discoveries like JuMBO.
“My motto is ‘Never expect anything and always keep an open mind!'” Parker concluded. “There are always aspects of physics that we don’t consider or overlook, so nothing is surprising, but it’s all interesting and it’s our job to explain it all!”
This means he won’t be looking forward to those socks you want to re-gift!
Diamond and Parker’s study was published in the November issue of The Astrophysical Journal.