The James Webb Space Telescope has spotted six strange worlds the size of planets that formed like stars – and the smallest may be building its own miniature solar system
Astronomers have found six new worlds that look like planets, but formed like stars. These so-called rogue worlds are between five and 15 times the mass of Jupiter, and one of them may even host the beginnings of a miniature solar system.at Johns Hopkins University in Maryland and his colleagues found these strange worlds in the NGC 1333 star cluster using the James Webb Space Telescope .
One of the brown dwarfs is particularly unusual – it has a ring of dust around it just like the one that formed the planets in our solar system. At about five Jupiter masses, it isever spotted with such a ring, and it may mark the beginnings of a strange, scaled-down planetary system around a failed star.
“From a miniature world around one these objects, you would see the glowing mainly in the infrared – it would be a very reddish glow – and over hundreds of millions of years it would be fading into obscurity,” says Jayawardhana. As the brown dwarf fades, any planets that may form around it will go into a deep freeze and the whole system will go dark, so these aren’t promising worlds to search for life.
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