NASA's Webb telescope spots 6 rogue planets: What it says about star, planet formation

In the latest discovery made possible by the James Webb Space Telescope, a group of astrophysicists detected six wandering rogue planets unbound from the gravitational influence of any star.

The group of cosmic bodies are slightly bigger than Jupiter and have no star to orbit. Instead, the researchers at Johns Hopkins University suspect the rogue worlds nearly 1,000 light-years from Earth came to existence in the same process that forms stars.

The discovery is an illuminating one, offering astrophysicists more insight and evidence into the cosmic recipe that creates stars and planets across the universe. The evidence the researchers came across provides a convincing "yes" to the question of whether the same cosmic process can just as easily give birth to a star as a Jupiter-sized planet.

“We are probing the very limits of the star forming process,” study lead author Adam Langeveld, an astrophysicist at Johns Hopkins, said in a statement. “If you have an object that looks like a young Jupiter, is it possible that it could have become a star under the right conditions? This is important context for understanding both star and planet formation.”

Webb observations provide insights into planet and star formation

The observations came from the Webb telescope, which surveyed a nebula named NGC 1333. The giant space cloud of dust and gas is located 960 light-years away in the Perseus constellation.

Unlike its predecessor, the Hubble Space Telescope, Webb has the capability of observing the universe in infrared light, which allowed the cosmic observatory to see through the dust obscuring the view of the star formation process.

Stars form when an accumulation of gas and dust collapses due to gravity. Scientists think that generally what follows is the formation of planets, which emerge from the giant, donut-shaped disk of gas and dust that circles young stars.

But by analyzing Webb's data, the astrophycistics discovered that within the nebula are rogue gas-giants five to 10 times more massive than Jupiter. The find offers convincing evidence confirming that celestial objects that are light enough can form from the same process that creates stars.

The team now says that those gas-giants are the lightest objects ever found to have grown from a process that would generally produce something as massive as a star and brown dwarfs – objects too big to be a planet and too small to be a star.

One of the newly-discovered celestial bodies has an estimated mass of five Jupiters, or about 1,600 Earths. That may sound heavy in comparison, but it was the lightest of the starless objects the team observed.

And because of the dusty disk surrounding the object, the team could conclude that it likely formed similar to a star. What's more, disks of gas and dust are a crucial ingredient for the formation of planets, meaning the object could form "mini" planets, according to the research.

"This might be a nursery of a miniature planetary system, on a scale much smaller than our solar system," study co-author Alexander Scholz, an astrophysicist at the University of St Andrews, said in a statement.

Learning more about rogue worlds

Mystery still surround rogue planets and their cryptic formations.

It's possible the nomadic worlds originate either from collapsing molecular clouds or when when gas and dust in disks around stars coalesce into planet-like orbs that are ejected from their star systems.

Regardless, the wandering objects defy traditional classification as either a gas giant or a brown dwarf because of their masses. And while they're rare in our Milky Way galaxy, the new Webb data show they account for about 10% of celestial bodies in the targeted star cluster.

"The diversity of systems that nature has produced is remarkable and pushes us to refine our models of star and planet formation," said senior study author Ray Jayawardhana, provost and astrophysicist at Johns Hopkins University.

More Webb analysis coming

In the coming months, the team will turn to Webb to study the celestial bodies and their atmospheres in order to compare them to heavier brown dwarfs and gas giant planets.

The astrophysicists will also use the space telescope to observe similar objects with dusty disks to learn more about mini planetary systems that resemble Jupiter's and Saturn's many moons.

The researchers' findings will be published in The Astronomical Journal.

Eric Lagatta covers breaking and trending news for USA TODAY. Reach him at elagatta@gannett.com