Latest Brown dwarf Stories
Brett Smith for redOrbit.com - Your Universe Online Using data obtained from a NASA satellite, a Pennsylvania State University astronomer has identified the closest solar system to be found within the past 97 years. According to astronomer Kevin Luhman’s report in the Astrophysical Journal Letters, the newly identified system is a pair of brown dwarf stars and the third-closest system to the Sun. “The distance to this brown dwarf pair is 6.5 light years -- so close that Earth's...
April Flowers for redOrbit.com - Your Universe Online There are small subsets of stars among the hundred billion in the Milky Way called ultra-cool dwarfs, which have a temperature below 2500 Kelvin. Both ultra-cool dwarfs and brown dwarfs exist at these lower temperatures. The lower temperatures indicate that these are some of the most ancient objects in our Galaxy, leading scientists to examine them for information on primitive chemical composition. The Gaia mission, which will be...
redOrbit Staff & Wire Reports - Your Universe Online By using the Hubble and Spitzer space telescopes, NASA officials say they have managed to complete the most detailed weather map to date for the cool, planet-like stars known as brown dwarfs. Brown dwarfs, which are also sometimes known as failed stars, form out of condensing gas but do not have the mass in order to fuse hydrogen atoms and produce energy, officials from the US space agency explained in a recent statement. As a...
WASHINGTON, Jan. 8, 2013 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- Astronomers using NASA's Spitzer and Hubble space telescopes have probed the stormy atmosphere of a brown dwarf, creating the most detailed "weather map" yet for this class of cool, star-like orbs. The forecast shows wind-driven, planet-sized clouds enshrouding these strange worlds. (Logo: http://photos.prnewswire.com/prnh/20081007/38461LOGO) Brown dwarfs form out of condensing gas, as stars do, but lack the mass to fuse...
Lee Rannals for redOrbit.com - Your Universe Online - Video 1 | Video 2 | Video 3 Astronomers using the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) have discovered that the outer region of a dusty disc encircling a brown dwarf contains solid grains like those found in denser discs of newborn stars. The find challenges theories of how rock, Earth-scale planets form, suggesting the planets may be more common in the Universe than expected. Scientists believe rocky planets form...
April Flowers for redOrbit.com - Your Universe Online New planets are discovered by astronomers in strange places, such as orbiting around a brown or white dwarf star. This leads scientists to wonder if they might support life because although neither brown nor white dwarfs are stars like our sun, they both glow and so could be orbited by planets with the right ingredients for life. Although no terrestrial, or earth-like, planets have been confirmed orbiting white or brown dwarf stars,...
Lawrence LeBlond for redOrbit.com - Your Universe Online The search for planets around other stars might have gotten a little easier now that a Lowell Observatory astronomer and her colleagues have developed a set of directions, per se, to aid others in the hunt for exoplanets. Publishing their work in the journal Astrophysical Letters, Evgenya Shkolnik and her collaborators examined new and existing data from known stars and brown dwarfs that are less than 300 million years old, as...
Astronomers are getting to know the neighbors better. Our sun resides within a spiral arm of our Milky Way galaxy about two-thirds of the way out from the center. It lives in a fairly calm, suburb-like area with an average number of stellar residents. Recently, NASA's Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer, or WISE, has been turning up a new crowd of stars close to home: the coldest of the brown dwarf family of "failed" stars. Now, just as scientists are "meeting and greeting" the new...
An international team of astronomers led by David Pinfield of the University of Hertfordshire has found a brown dwarf that is more than 99% hydrogen and helium. Described as ultra-cool, it has a temperature of just 400 degrees Celsius and its discovery could be a key step forward in helping astronomers distinguish between brown dwarfs and giant planets. The researchers publish their work in the journal Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society. Brown dwarfs are star-like objects...
A new atlas and catalog of the entire infrared sky with more than a half-billion stars, galaxies and other objects captured by NASA's Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE) mission was unveiled by NASA Wednesday. "Today WISE delivers the fruit of 14 years of effort to the astronomical community," said Edward L. (Ned) Wright, a UCLA professor of physics and astronomy and the mission's principal investigator, who began working on the mission in 1998. A 10-foot unmanned satellite...
