JWST found rogue worlds that blur the line between stars and planets
By Leah Crane, NewScientist.
Excerpt: Astronomers have found six new worlds that look like planets, but formed like stars. These so-called rogue worlds are between five and 15 times the mass of Jupiter, and one of them may even host the beginnings of a miniature solar system. ...From their observations, the researchers determined that planetary mass brown dwarfs make up about 10 per cent of the objects in NGC 1333. That is far more than expected based on models of star formation, so there may be extra processes, such as turbulence, that drive the formation of these rogue worlds. ...One of the brown dwarfs is particularly unusual – it has a ring of dust around it just like the one that formed the planets in our solar system. At about five Jupiter masses, it is the smallest world ever spotted with such a ring, and it may mark the beginnings of a strange, scaled-down planetary system around a failed star....