Rogue planets are planetary bodies that don’t orbit a host star, instead hurtling through space seemingly randomly. Now the James Webb space telescope has identified several of them and they’re wandering through an utterly gorgeous part of space.
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00:00Rogue planets are planetary bodies that don't orbit a host star, instead hurtling through
00:08space seemingly randomly.
00:10Experts believe many of them form in binary star systems and were ultimately ejected from
00:15them left to wander the cosmos.
00:17Now the James Webb Space Telescope has identified several of them and they're wandering through
00:21an utterly gorgeous part of space.
00:23This is a star forming nebula in the Perseus constellation.
00:27Researchers say they have found six rogue planets meandering through it.
00:30Rogue planets are of interest to astronomers as we don't currently know the limit at which
00:34a body of coalescing material may collapse and become a star, as opposed to remaining
00:38a massive planet.
00:40Many experts wonder if rather than being jettisoned from a star system, some rogue planets were
00:44meant to be stars, but simply never got there.
00:47And the most recent rogue planets discovered are huge, between five and ten times the mass
00:51of Jupiter, our solar system's most massive planet.
00:54With the researchers concluding after this new discovery, our observations confirm that
00:59nature produces planetary mass objects in at least two different ways.
01:02From the contraction of a cloud of gas and dust, the way stars form, and in disks of
01:06gas and dust around young stars, as Jupiter in our own solar system did.