The National Astronomical Observatory of Japan announced Wednesday that its telescope in Hawaii has spotted about 100 "small floating objects" in a star-forming region.
NAOJ officials said the objects -- viewed through the Subaru optical-infrared telescope located on Hawaii Island's 4,205-meter Mauna Kea -- have been found among several hundred faint young objects in the S106 region.
The region is approximately 2,000 light years away from Earth in the direction of the Northern Cross, the officials said.
The discovery of small floating objects in such numbers is a first, according to the observatory, based in the western Tokyo suburb of Mitaka. About 10 have previously been observed in the Taurus and Orion constellations, among others.
Small floating objects are suspended inside a nebula instead of orbiting around fixed stars, NAOJ said, adding they are each believed to have a mass of less than one-tenth of Jupiter.
The several hundred faint young objects apparently recently emerged at the tip of the Northern Cross with a solar mass of less than eight-hundredths, it said.
Yumiko Oasa, a student at the University of Tokyo, and others made the observation and recorded an image of the S106 region between May and June 1999 through a near-infrared camera.
At the center of the S106 region is IRS4, a massive star born some 100,000 years ago with a solar mass of about 20 times that of the sun.
"It is necessary to clarify whether these are from brown dwarfs, which cannot shine on their own, or part of a group of planets," Oasa said.
The Subaru telescope, with an 8.2-meter mirror, is considered one of the world's biggest telescopes.