Webb telescope discovers 6 distant, ‘rogue’ planets – and a mystery that stumps scientists

They can’t all be stars.

Researchers using the James Webb telescope have discovered six distant “rogue” worlds that may have separate origins.

What is unusual is that none of the planet-sized bodies, all between five and 15 times the mass of Jupiter, orbit a star, as Earth does with the sun.

A Johns Hopkins University team is drawn to the potential that these were actually brown dwarfs, the astronomical term for failed stars.

“If you have an object that looks like a young Jupiter, is it possible that it could have become a star under the right conditions?” said lead study author Adam Langeveld.

The “celestial entities” — found in the nebula NGC1333 within the constellation Persuasive 960 light-years away — most likely formed from the failed collapse of gas and dust stars, New Scientist magazine reported.

The European Space Agency recently released new images of the region.

Planetary scientists were shocked that nothing embodied a mass below what would be five times the mass of Jupiter.

“In some ways, what’s most surprising is what we didn’t find,” researcher Ray Jayawardhana said of the discovery, now published in The Astronomical Journal.

It may be an important distinction that brown dwarfs cannot form from anything relatively lighter – as it is, the detection equates to only about 10% of the mass of NGC1333.

“Our observations confirm that nature produces planetary-mass objects in at least two different ways,” Jayawardhana said in a release. “From the contraction of a cloud of gas and dust, the way stars form, and into disks of gas and dust around young stars, as Jupiter did in our solar system.”

And, of the six unique exoplanets, one stands out in particular.

It was observed to have an orbital ring of dust similar to the one that formed a perimeter around our solar system billions of years ago during its formation.

“Those small objects with masses comparable to the giant planets may themselves be able to form their own planets,” added co-author Alex Scholz.

“This could be a nursery for a miniature planetary system on a scale much smaller than our own solar system.”