astralavista

Scientists have long believed that our baby solar system looked something like a fried egg: the yolk of the Solar orb in the center a flat disc of of gas and dust from which the planets were forming.
Now this model got a little scrambled. Scientists at the university of Toronto and the European Space Observatory in Chile have observed two massive planet-like objects called "planemos" orbiting each other on their journey through space.
Pairs of stars orbiting each other are quite common. (The dog days of August are named after the dog star Sirius, one of the brightest objects in the late summer sky, which in fact is a system of two stars spinning around each other.) However, a pair of planemos orbiting in a similar fashion has never been seen.
"Their mere existence is a surprise, and their origin and fate a bit of a mystery," said Ray Jayawardhana, an associate professor of astronomy and astrophysics at the University of Toronto. Jayawardhana and his colleague Valentin D. Ivanov of the European Southern Observatory report the discovery in the August 3 issue of Science Express.
The planemos in question are quite chunky. The smaller one is seven times as large as Jupiter, the biggest planet in the Solar system, the other one is twice its size. But the scientists wrote that "both objects have masses similar to those of extra-solar giant planets, usually found in orbit around a star."
Jayawardhana and Ivanov wrote that he newborn pair is barely a million years old. The planemos are staring at each other across a vast cosmic chasm some six times the distance between the sun and Pluto wide. They are located in the Ophiuchus star-forming region approximately 400 light years away.
"Roughly half of all sun-like stars, and about a sixth of brown dwarfs, come in pairs," Jayawardhana said . Brown dwarfs are moribund stars that weigh less than 75 Jupiter masses. Their mass is not sufficient to ignite and sustain nuclear fusion, and burn like a regular star.
The Toronto team wrote that the "existence of this wide pair poses a challenge to a popular theory which suggests that brown dwarfs and planemos are embryos ejected from multiple proto-star systems. Since the two objects in...are so far apart, and only weakly bound to each other by gravity, they would not have survived such a chaotic birth."
Jayawardhana and Ivanov said that planets are thought to form out of disks of gas and dust that surround stars, brown dwarfs and even some planemos. They believe that "these planemo twins formed together out of a contracting gas cloud that fragmented, like a miniature stellar binary.
"We are resisting the temptation to call it a 'double planet' because this pair probably didn't form the way that planets in our solar system did," says Ivanov. "Now we're curious to find out whether such pairs are common or rare. The answer could shed light on how free-floating planetary-mass objects form."