James Webb Unearths Star Birth Clues in Six Rogue Planets

The James Webb Space Telescope has discovered six likely rogue worlds, objects with planet-like masses that are untethered from any star’s gravity. These findings were part of a deep survey of the young nebula NGC1333, a star-forming cluster located about a thousand light-years away in the Perseus constellation. Among the rogue worlds identified, one stands out as the lightest ever discovered with a dusty disk around it, having an estimated mass of five Jupiters or about 1,600 Earths.

The discovery suggests that the same cosmic processes that give birth to stars may also be involved in creating objects slightly bigger than Jupiter. The data indicates that these rogue worlds are gas giants, 5 to 10 times more massive than Jupiter, and are among the lowest-mass objects ever found to have grown from a process that typically produces stars and brown dwarfs. This observation may have important implications for understanding the limits of the star-forming process and could potentially shed light on the formation of miniature planetary systems.