In new images of the nebula captured by the James Webb Space Telescope, astronomers have made a puzzling discovery - dozens of Jupiter-sized objects that defy explanation. The discovery was made in the bright nebula Messier 42, located in the constellation Orion. The James Webb is an infrared telescope, ideal for observing through large clouds of dust and gas such as nebulae.

Image of the Orion Nebula as seen through the James Webb's Near Infrared Camera (NIRCam) long wavelength channel NASA, ESA, CSA/Science Leadership and Image Processing: M. McCaughrean, S. Pearson, CCBY-SA3.0IGO

Star maps of the region can now be fully explored in ESASky, the European Space Agency's online astronomical data visualization system. Scientists and casual users alike can scroll through high-definition images of the night sky, view it in different wavelengths of light, and zoom in on any random spot to see what's there.

Expected (but equally spectacular) discoveries include protostars still forming and young stars with disks of dust around them, as well as incredible structures carved into the nebula through interactions between radiation and chemistry.

But zooming in on certain areas may reveal pairs of small dots. They may not look like much to the untrained eye, but the existence of these mysterious new objects makes no real sense and could usher in a new category of astronomical entities.

In this part of the Orion Nebula, exploreable on ESASky, several JUMBOs can be seen as small, faint points. NASA, ESA, CSA/Science Leadership and Image Processing: M. McCaughrean, S. Pearson, CCBY-SA3.0IGO

The team calls them Jupiter-mass binary objects (JUMBOs), which pretty much tells you everything you need to know about them. They range from about half to several times the mass of Jupiter, and for some reason, most of them are binary pairs. However, their most puzzling feature is that they float freely in space and do not orbit any star.

While free-floating or "rogue" planets have been discovered before, the sheer number of objects in the region (more than 30 pairs) raises some thorny questions. How are they formed? Where did it come from? How come they pair up so consistently?

Typically, planets are thought to form in disks of dust around young stars, and there's always the possibility that a game of gravitational billiards could knock some of them into interstellar space. But it seems unlikely that this would happen so many times in one region of space, and even in that case the chaotic interactions should make it nearly impossible for many of them to partner up.

Currently, our best models of star and planet formation cannot explain these giant stars. Although they are comparable in size to planets, they are not technically classified as planets yet. Future observations may help provide new clues, but to do so we may need to modify some fairly basic models.

JUMBO and other features of the Orion Nebula can be explored in ESASky:

https://sky.esa.int/esasky/?hips=2MASS+color+JHK&jwst_image=webb_orionnebula_shortwave&hide_footprints=true