The original version of this story appeared in Quanta Magazine.
When Galileo Galilei, a mathematician at the University of Padua, trained a spyglass of his own creation on the sky, he was overwhelmed with what he saw—more than 500 new stars in the constellation Orion, in addition to the familiar three in the hunter’s belt and six in the sword.
In October, astronomers used the James Webb Space Telescope to zoom in on one of the middle stars in the sword and identified another 500 or so previously unseen spots. The worlds are so small and dim that they blur the line between star and planet. It’s an ambiguity that plagued
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