The Orion Nebula Is Full of Impossible Enigmas That Come in Pairs 25
We have discovered a lot in this universe. Planets that orbit stars at right angles. Forbidden worlds that have cheated death. Space explosions that defy explanation. Yet the cosmos continues to surprise us. The latest spectacle, observed by the James Webb Space Telescope, is an agglomeration of nearly 150 free-floating objects amid the Orion Nebula, not far in mass from Jupiter. From a report: Dozens of these worlds are even orbiting each other. The scientists who discovered them have called them Jupiter Mass Binary Objects, or JuMBOs, and the reason for their appearance is a complete mystery. "There's something wrong with either our understanding of planet formation, star formation -- or both," said Samuel Pearson, a scientist at the European Space Agency who worked on the observations that were shared on Monday, which have not yet been peer reviewed. "They shouldn't exist."
The Orion Nebula is a region of star formation 1,350 light-years from Earth, located in the belt of the northern hemisphere constellation of Orion. It has long been studied by astronomers, but the scientists involved in the new Webb telescope study of the area, also released on Monday, say the new images are "by far" the best views yet. "We have better than Hubble resolution but now in the infrared," said Mark McCaughrean, a senior adviser for science and exploration at the ESA. He said the latest observations revealed reams of star formation and fledgling planetary systems in a manner never seen before.
The Orion Nebula is a region of star formation 1,350 light-years from Earth, located in the belt of the northern hemisphere constellation of Orion. It has long been studied by astronomers, but the scientists involved in the new Webb telescope study of the area, also released on Monday, say the new images are "by far" the best views yet. "We have better than Hubble resolution but now in the infrared," said Mark McCaughrean, a senior adviser for science and exploration at the ESA. He said the latest observations revealed reams of star formation and fledgling planetary systems in a manner never seen before.
Meh. (Score:1)
Three stars.
Not News For Trekkies (Score:5, Funny)
Star Trek fans have known the Orion Nebula was full of rule-breakers for a long time. /duck
Re: Not News For Trekkies (Score:2)
Shouldn't that be titled "Unexpected" Enigmas? (Score:5, Interesting)
Shouldn't that be "Improbable Enigmas", since they are clearly not impossible? Or, how about "Never-before-seen" since I doubt any other similar nebula has been imaged in the detail and wavelength that this has been. So, since we really have no idea how probable or improbable it is, we should maybe go with the mediocrity principle that suggests in the absence of a large sample set, circumstances that you observe should be assumed to be the normal state if things.
It bothers me when, every time we see something new, it is trumpeted that we've just seen something amazingly rare. Only to find out that, no, it's not rare, it's everywhere. It was like that for exoplanets. Before their discovery, astronomers were telling us that we shouldn't think that star systems with planets were everywhere, that it was likely that they were a rarity. And now we find that it's very likely that a naked star is extremely rare.
So how about we just go with "never-before-seen", or even "unexpected".... I like that last one. It conveys the idea so much better.
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I agree so hard. Language is important and subtlety is lost on so many that, at least for communication with the general public, it ought to be avoided.
It's the same as when people use words to describe evolutionary processes that implied intent... there are just too many people who don't understand that's a linguistic shortcut, and most of them vote.
Re:Shouldn't that be titled "Unexpected" Enigmas? (Score:4, Insightful)
Admitting that we didn't know or might have been wrong about things comes hard to people. Ego, whatever. There are human reasons. As i've gotten older, it's become more and more obvious that things I took for granted, like the maturity of others, cannot be taken for granted, least of all in myself.
Best I can figure is to try to be better once you are aware of the shortfall, and be thankful you found out. Many people go to their grave without figuring it out.
Yes, waaaay too deep for a /. post.
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I have never understood how someone who studies a subject intently can be hurt or upset by learning the subject is vastly deeper and more enigmatic than they suspected.
I cannot imagine what kind of person acts like that. But most of you do.
It feels gross to imagine thinking like that. So deeply dishonest. Like the whole respn you pursued it was about some deficiency of yourself and not truth at all.
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It's a shorthand--we do this all the time, and it's a perfectly reasonable formulation. 'Impossible' here means "according to our knowledge of physics, this shouldn't be able to happen, and now that we've seen it, we need to revisit some fundamental assumptions, because if this is how things work, we have a lot of work to do".
I had to get dental implants, and I was still feeling a lot of pain. The doctor injected me yet again (the only time I've ever had a dentist run out of freezing agent and have to fill
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Declarations of impossibility aren't meant to convey that we aren't observing what we're observing, just that given a hypothetical in the absence of this evidence, we would've flatly said it couldn't happen.
IoW they show that we were prejudiced and ignorant, which are useful things to know, but impossible still means not possible so it also means we were just making shit up. Your dentist thought he and the pharmaco that made the drug you were being injected with were infallible. It's a common failing of health professionals, they do all that schooling and then are sure they know more than they do because it was hard and otherwise, what did they get out of it? As it turns out, the primary thing they got was a p
Batty (Score:4, Insightful)
I've seen things you people wouldn't believe.
Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion.
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"All those moments will be lost in time, like a fart in the wind ..."
Better change that last bit to "like tears in rain...". Damn WGA strike. They were off for too long and got rusty.
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You have won the internet today.
The picutre of the exploded star (Score:2)
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Then the paywall popup appears.
Re:The picutre of the exploded star (Score:5, Informative)
https://static01.nyt.com/image... [nyt.com]
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no, that's goat.se
low-mass protostellar nebulae (Score:4, Informative)
Low-mass (sub-solar) Bonner-Ebert spheres collapsed by passing shock wave. Depending on the exact dynamics of the immediate post collapse stage (dictated largely by exactly how much angular momentum it has) it ends up either continuing the accretion process until you form a free flying Jupiter or fissions and forms two Jupiters at "wide" separations.
Either way, if no star ignites in the center to evaporate the gas from the disk, the gas remains and facilitates everything ultimately spiraling into the central object.
"come in pairs" (Score:1)
Yes, green pairs. [wikipedia.org]
obligatory (Score:2)
That's no moon! ( or world)