Bizarre Planets That ‘Shouldn’t Exist’ Discovered in Orion Nebula

Scientists have discovered dozens of strange planets hanging inside the Orion star constellation—strange because these bodies shouldn't be there given what we know about the cosmos.

"There’s something wrong with either our understanding of planet formation, star formation — or both," Samuel Pearson, a European Space agency scientist and a co-author on a new study examining the planets, told the New York Times. "They shouldn’t exist."

The planets, which researchers call Jupiter-Mass Binary Objects, were spotted by the James Webb Space Telescope and discovered while observing the Orion Nebula, which appears as the constellation's middle star. What's confusing isn't that they exist—rather, it's that the planets appear to orbit each other, not a star.

Those orbits are quite, quite long: possibly as much as 20,000 as much as 20,000 years. In all, the researchers found 42 of these planets in the nebula, which is 1,500 light years away from Earth. 

Generally, planets are formed by a star's gravitational pull, tugging them into their orbit. With these planets spotted orbiting each other in Orion's nebula, scientists believe they initially formed around stars but were later spun off by the stars when the stars came into contact with each other.

Finding these planets behaving like this is "like kicking a cup of tea across a room and having all the tea land in the teacup," Pearson said. "And then doing that 42 times."