There’s a class of objects in the cosmos that are neither stars, nor are they quite planets.
Astronomers used the powerful James Webb Space Telescope to sleuth out some of these objects, called brown dwarfs, in a vibrant star-forming region of our galaxy called the Flame Nebula. Brown dwarfs are too small to trigger the nuclear engines in stars, but are more massive than most planets. They are unbound, free-flying objects in the universe.
And with this new research, scientists have improved our understanding of these elusive free-floating worlds and earned a good grasp of their mass limitations. Their mass can be as low as two to three times the mass of Jupiter, a gas giant over 300 times more massive than Earth. (Webb could view smaller objects, but didn’t find any.)
“Webb, for the first time, has been able to probe up to and beyond that limit,” Michael Meyer, an astronomer at the University of Michigan, said in a statement. “If that limit is real, there really shouldn’t be any one-Jupiter-mass objects free-floating out in our Milky Way galaxy, unless they were formed as planets and then ejected out of a planetary system.”
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