A new and stunning close-up look into a nebula in the constellation Orion calls into question a previous finding of extrasolar planets there, an astronomer said.

Orion contains one of the nearest and most active stellar nurseries in our Milky Way galaxy. The Orion Nebula is a complex of gas and dust illuminated by several massive and hot stars at its core, known as the Trapezium.

This week, a team of astronomers using the Very Large Telescope (VLT) in Chile released a close-up image of the Trapezium Cluster where a British team identified last year unusual free-floating objects which they described as huge gas planets bereft of central stars.

Mark McCaughrean of the Astrophysical Institute Potsdam, Germany said the new image, taken with the stronger telescope, makes the earlier interpretation seem less plausible.

McCaughrean and his colleagues found that some of the proposed planets were intrinsically brighter than the British team had thought, which "means they must be higher mass and therefore are above the boundary for what some people consider to be planets." Instead, he would call them "brown dwarf objects" -- so-called failed stars that lack the mass and fuel to burn like a sun.

"In some other cases, we were able to see that the objects were not really point sources (which had been interpreted as planets)," McCaughrean said. "Some of those we resolved into knots of gas. They aren't stars, or point sources, at all. They are knots of gas in the nebula."

Most of the rest of the faint sources may be somewhat older, more massive brown dwarfs lying just in front of or just behind the young cluster, he said.

Morris L. Aizenman, senior science associate in the Mathematical and Physical Science Directorate of the National Science Foundation, specializes on the topic of exoplanets. He saw "no reason" to disagree with McCaughrean's findings.

"Of course part of the definition here is these objects are pretty massive," Aizenman said. "They may not be shining by their own light. My own personal feeling is they are brown dwarfs."

Aizenman chalked up the change in diagnosis for the objects to the progress of science.