Scientists have received a surprising Christmas present this year in the form of a possible solution to the mystery of JuMBOs, strange celestial objects that don’t appear to be planets or stars.
According to Space.comthe mysterious JuMBOs (Jupiter-mass binary objects) are actually thought to be stellar cores by a team of researchers. These covers have been violently “unwrapped” by big, powerful stars who open presents with childlike excitement on Christmas Day.
This finding could potentially solve the mystery that arose in 2023.
In the Orion Nebula cluster, astronomers using the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) discovered 42 pairs of these free-floating planetary mass objects.
Because they were not associated with a star and somehow managed to live in binary pairs, astronomers were confused.
Causing considerable confusion, he suggested that JuMBOs do not form like planets or stars.
Led by Richard Parker of the University of Sheffield and undergraduate student Jessica Diamond, the team that developed the idea to explain the formation of JuMBO did so by revisiting an earlier idea to explain the phenomenon.
“We’re using a fairly old idea — that the radiation from massive stars is so strong that it destroys the ‘bore’ of gas that eventually becomes a star,” Parker explained. Space.com.
“Radiation removes some material from the core, reducing its mass, but also compresses the remaining material so that it effectively forms a low-mass object,” he added.
The fact that stars commonly form in binary systems was used by the team in a review of a paper published exactly 20 years ago. They then applied the photoerosion framework to show that a stellar binary can be photoeroded to form a jumbo pair.