Astronomers have engaged the James Webb Telescope (JWST) to determine the lower mass limit of failed stars in the Flame Nebula. It is 2 to 3 Jupiter masses.
When we speak about regions of active star formation, we mean that stars are born in them. However, this is not entirely true. During the fragmentation process, molecular clouds gradually break up into progressively smaller units, or fragments. The smallest of them have insufficient mass to allow thermonuclear reactions to start inside them.
Such “failed stars” fall into two main categories. Bodies whose masses range from 13 to 80 Jupiter masses are called brown dwarfs. Less massive bodies are classified as free-floating objects.
Studying failed stars is not an easy task. They quickly become very dim and much cooler than stars. These factors make observing them with most telescopes difficult, if not impossible, even at very short distances.
However, while brown dwarfs and free-floating objects are very young, they are relatively hot and emit infrared radiation. Its peculiarity is that it can pass through dense gas-dust clouds in regions of active star formation. This gives astronomers the opportunity to study them with telescopes like JWST.
As part of the new study, a team of astronomers engaged JWST to study the Flame Nebula. It is a star-forming hotspot less than 1 million years old, located 1,400 light-years from Earth. The researchers were interested in the lower mass limit of objects born in such regions.
Observations have provided an answer to this question. JWST has identified free-floating objects in the Flame Nebula whose mass is only two to three times that of Jupiter. Since the sensitivity of the telescope allows to find objects with masses up to 0.5 of Jupiter’s mass, astronomers believe they have found the limit of fragmentation of molecular clouds. This means that any free-flying objects in the Milky Way with masses less than that of Jupiter originally formed as planets and were already ejected from their systems later.
Earlier we reported on how JWST photographed the “hourglass” in which new stars were born.
According to Phys.org
