During an exploration of the constellation Perseus, pointing the James Webb telescope towards the nebula NGC1333, the telescope discovered 6 wandering candidates with planetary masses between 5 and 10 times the mass of Jupiter, one of which would have a disk of dust.
Spectacular image of the nebula NGC1333 located 960 light-years from Earth. The sensitivity and infrared vision of the Webb telescope allows it to pierce the veil of dust and reveal nascent stars, brown dwarfs and planetary-mass objects. Among the fainter objects in the image, some are in fact wandering brown dwarfs, newly born with masses comparable to those of giant planets. In the center of the image, we see large orange spots or Herbig-Haro objects. They represent gas that glows in the infrared and are formed when ionized material ejected by young stars collides with the surrounding cloud and are characteristic of very active star formation sites.
Many young stars in this cluster, only 1 to 3 million years old, are surrounded by disks of gas and dust, capable of generating planetary systems. On the right side of the image, we can see the shadow of one of these edge-on disks: two dark cones emanating from opposite sides, seen against a bright background.
Over 600 compact sources were detected in this study, 114 of which have plausible stellar spectra, most of them classified as early or mid-sized M dwarfs.
Among these sources, the exceptional discovery is the evidence of 6 objects whose spectra correspond to the M9 to L4 spectral models. One of them has a clear infrared excess indicating the presence of a dusty disk. These objects are good candidates for being planets with estimated masses of about 5 to 10 MJup or Jupiter masses. In particular, it is worth noting that none of the spectra of these 6 objects show clear signs of methane absorption, characteristic of T dwarfs or stars with masses less than 4 times the mass of Jupiter (4 MJup).
Another interesting case was detected with a brown dwarf whose companion, potentially a planet, has a spectral type M9, corresponding to a mass close to the deuterium burning limit.
Spectacular image of the nebula NGC1333 located 960 light-years from Earth. The sensitivity and infrared vision of the Webb telescope allows it to pierce the veil of dust and reveal nascent stars, brown dwarfs and planetary-mass objects. Among the fainter objects in the image, some are in fact wandering brown dwarfs, newly born with masses comparable to that of giant planets. In the center of the image, we see large orange spots or Herbig-Haro objects. They represent gas that glows in the infrared and are formed when ionized material ejected by young stars collides with the surrounding cloud and are characteristic of very active star formation sites.
Many young stars in this cluster, only 1 to 3 million years old, are surrounded by disks of gas and dust, capable of generating planetary systems. On the right side of the image, we can see the shadow of one of these edge-on disks: two dark cones emanating from opposite sides, seen against a bright background.
Over 600 compact sources were detected in this study, 114 of which have plausible stellar spectra, most of them classified as early or mid-sized M dwarfs.
Among these sources, the exceptional discovery is the evidence of 6 objects whose spectra correspond to the M9 to L4 spectral models. One of them has a clear infrared excess indicating the presence of a dusty disk. These objects are good candidates for being planets with estimated masses of about 5 to 10 MJup or Jupiter masses. In particular, it is worth noting that none of the spectra of these 6 objects show clear signs of methane absorption, characteristic of T dwarfs or stars with masses less than 4 times the mass of Jupiter (4 MJup).
Another interesting case was detected with a brown dwarf whose companion, potentially a planet, has a spectral type M9, corresponding to a mass close to the deuterium burning limit.
Scientific paper : https://arxiv.org/pdf/2408.12639
Articles :
https://esawebb.org/images/potm2408a/
https://www.esa.int/ESA_Multimedia/Images/2024/08/Webb_peeks_into_Perseus