Mysterious "rogue" pairs of Jupiter-size objects spotted by the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) are a tiny fraction of those that originally formed, a new study suggests. The finding hints that these enigmatic entities, dubbed "JuMBOs," are even rarer than previously thought — and casts doubt on their very existence.
JuMBOs, short for "Jupiter-mass binary objects," are pairs of planet-like, Jupiter-size objects that JWST spotted in the trapezoid region of the Orion Nebula Cluster in 2023. Each JuMBO comprises two gas giants between 0.7 and 30 times Jupiter's mass. The members of a JuMBO don't orbit stars; instead, they twirl around each other at distances of approximately 25 to 400 astronomical units, making them free-floating or "rogue." (One astronomical unit is approximately 93 million miles, or 150 million kilometers, the average distance between Earth and the sun.)
