At the end of 2023, astronomers made a startling discovery in the Orion Nebula. Using the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), the team found 40 pairs of planetary mass objects — none of which orbit a star. They're called Jupiter-Mass Binary Objects, or JuMBOs.
In short, this discovery directly challenged both star birth and planet formation theories. The origins of these orbs remained unknown, and it was unclear how such a large collection of pairs of these bodies came to wander the Orion stellar nursery, which is located around 1,350 light-years from Earth.
