Pluto hogs the spotlight in the continuing scientific debate over what is and what is not a planet, but a less conspicuous argument rages on about the planetary status of massive objects outside our solar system. The dispute ...
Astronomy
Jan 23, 2018
1
133
Using NASA's Hubble Space Telescope to peer deep into the vast stellar nursery called the Orion Nebula, astronomers searched for small, faint bodies. What they found was the largest population yet of brown dwarfs—objects ...
Astronomy
Jan 11, 2018
0
47
Twinkle, twinkle, little star, how I wonder what you are. Astronomers are hopeful that the powerful infrared capability of NASA's James Webb Space Telescope will resolve a puzzle as fundamental as stargazing itself—what ...
Astronomy
Jan 4, 2018
5
373
Taking a picture of an exoplanet—a planet in a solar system beyond our sun—is no easy task. The light of a planet's parent star far outshines the light from the planet itself, making the planet difficult to see. While ...
Astronomy
Dec 4, 2017
1
142
Dim objects called brown dwarfs, less massive than the sun but more massive than Jupiter, have powerful winds and clouds–specifically, hot patchy clouds made of iron droplets and silicate dust. Scientists recently realized ...
Astronomy
Aug 18, 2017
0
14
One night three months ago, Rosa Castro finished her dinner, opened her laptop, and uncovered a novel object that was neither planet nor star. Therapist by day and amateur astronomer by night, Castro joined the NASA-funded ...
Astronomy
Jul 17, 2017
0
44
Brown dwarf stars are failed stars. Their masses are so small, less than about eighty Jupiter-masses, that they lack the ability to heat up their interiors to the roughly ten million kelvin temperatures required for normal ...
Astronomy
Jul 11, 2017
1
54
Our galaxy could have 100 billion brown dwarfs or more, according to work by an international team of astronomers, led by Koraljka Muzic from the University of Lisbon and Aleks Scholz from the University of St Andrews. On ...
Astronomy
Jul 5, 2017
14
579
Scientists recently discovered the hottest planet ever found – with a surface temperature greater than some stars. As the hunt for planets outside our own solar system continues, we have discovered many other worlds with ...
Astronomy
Jun 12, 2017
1
65
An international team of astronomers using data from the rejuvenated Kepler space telescope have discovered a rare gem: A binary system consisting of a failed star, also known as a brown dwarf, and the remnant of a dead star ...
Astronomy
Jun 9, 2017
0
576
