A newly spotted pair of planet-sized objects floating far away from any star has astronomers puzzling over how such a bizarre system could have formed.
Using the European Southern Observatory's telescopes in Chile, astronomers have spotted a seven-Jupiter mass object paired to another 14-Jupiter-mass companion. Instead of orbiting around a star, however, the two planetary mass objects, or "planemos," are circling each other.
Planemos are objects similar to brown dwarfs, failed stars too small to sustain the nuclear reactions required for stellar ignition. But at only a few times more massive than Jupiter, they resemble planets more than stars.
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