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Orion's mysterious free-floating planets
We thought we broadly understood how planets and stars form. But the discovery of dozens of pairs of young planets in a nearby nebula threatens to turn that on its head.
Drifting through the Orion Nebula – an enormous cloud of dust and gas relatively close by in our galaxy – are what appears to be dozens of Jupiter-sized planets that don't conform to the conventional understanding of how planetary systems form. "Cosmic rays could act like a very viscous fluid and transport angular momentum out," says Jonathan Katz, an astronomer at Washington University in St Louis in the US, who came up with the idea. The James Webb Space Telescope captured these red "fingers," a result of an explosive event that occurred 500-1,000 years ago (Credit: Nasa/Esa/CSA/Mark McCaughrean/Sam Pearson)
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