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(Image credit: NASA, ESA
What it is: The Flame Nebula(NGC 2024)star-forming area
Where it is: 1,400 light-years away, in the constellation Orion
When it was shared: March 10, 2025
Why it’s so unique: What are the tiniest stars? A deep dive into the star-forming Flame Nebula by the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST)has actually exposed free-floating, Jupiter-size things that might assist address that crucial concern in astronomy.
The free-floating things are brown overshadows, which straddle the line in between stars and worlds. Brown overshadows are frequently called “failed stars” due to the fact that they do not get thick and hot adequate to end up being stars and, rather, ultimately cool to end up being dim, hard-to-see items.
Precisely how little a brown dwarf can be is a secret, mostly since these items are difficult to study utilizing basic telescopes. JWST is delicate to infrared light, which it sees as heat. The telescope went trying to find fairly warm and intense young brown overshadows in the Flame Nebula, whose thick dust and gas showed no match for its infrared detectors.
An uncropped view of the image. (Image credit: NASA, ESA, CSA, STScI, Michael Meyer (University of Michigan), Matthew De Furio (UT Austin), Massimo Robberto (STScI), Alyssa Pagan (STScI))
Related: 42 jaw-dropping James Webb Space Telescope images
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It discovered free-floating things 2 to 3 times the mass of Jupiter, though the telescope can discovering things half the mass of the gas giant. That’s smaller sized than researchers anticipated.
NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope has actually been searching for brown overshadows for years. Formerly, Hubble determined possible prospects in an area of the Flame Nebula called the Orion Molecular Cloud Complex. Now, JWST has actually gotten the baton and finished what researchers called “a quantum leap” in comprehending brown overshadows.
“It’s really difficult to do this work, looking at brown dwarfs down to even ten Jupiter masses, from the ground, especially in regions like this,” Matthew De Furioan astronomer at the University of Texas at Austin and lead author of a research study released today in The Astrophysical Journal Letters, stated in a declaration “Having existing Hubble data over the last 30 years or so allowed us to know that this is a really useful star-forming region to target. We needed to have Webb to be able to study this particular science topic.”
The scientists hope JWST’s capability to divide the light from an item into its constituent wavelengths will assist them clarify the limits in between a world, a brown dwarf and a full-fledged star.
For more superb area images, have a look at our Area Photo of the Week archives
Jamie Carter is an independent reporter and routine Live Science factor based in Cardiff, U.K. He is the author of A Stargazing Program For Beginners and lectures on astronomy and the natural world. Jamie routinely composes for Space.com, TechRadar.com, Forbes Science, BBC Wildlife publication and Scientific American, and numerous others. He modifies WhenIsTheNextEclipse.com.
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