“I think of JuMBOs as a cross between stars and brown dwarfs – they would have been like stars had it not been for the radiation from the more massive stars, which has sculpted them to be more like brown dwarfs.”
Scientists have received an unexpected Christmas gift this year: a potential solution to the mystery of JuMBOs, strange celestial objects that seem not to be planets or stars. Try putting a bow on that!
This gift comes courtesy of a team of researchers who believe that mysterious JuMBOs (Jupiter-mass binary objects) are actually stellar cores that have been violently “unwrapped” by massive, powerful stars like kids excitedly unwrapping presents on X-mas day. This could potentially solve a mystery that arose in 2023.
The team that devised this idea to explain JuMBO formation, led by Richard Parker of the University of Sheffield and undergraduate student Jessica Diamond, did so by revisiting an old idea to explain this new phenomenon.
The theory revolves around “photo erosion,” a process during which massive and violent stars, O-type or B-type stellar objects, blast other stars with high-energy radiation to strip away their outer layers. This idea fits because the star-forming Orion nebula is replete with hot and massive OB stars.
“We are using quite an old idea – that radiation from massive stars is so strong it erodes the gas ‘core’ that eventually forms a star,” Parker told Space.com. “The radiation removes some of the material from the core, reducing its mass, but also compressing the remaining material so that it efficiently forms a low-mass object.”