With the help of citizen scientists, astronomers have discovered two highly unusual brown dwarfs, balls of gas that are not massive enough to power themselves the way stars do.
Astronomy
Jul 10, 2020
2
1248
Brown dwarfs are the middle child of astronomy, too big to be a planet yet not big enough to be a star. Like their stellar siblings, these objects form from the gravitational collapse of gas and dust. But rather than condensing ...
Astronomy
Jun 2, 2020
4
728
A team of astronomers has discovered that the closest known brown dwarf, Luhman 16A, shows signs of cloud bands similar to those seen on Jupiter and Saturn. This is the first time scientists have used the technique of polarimetry ...
Astronomy
May 5, 2020
3
2586
A bustling stellar nursery in the picturesque Orion Nebula will be a subject of study for NASA's James Webb Space Telescope, scheduled to launch in 2021. A team led by Mark McCaughrean, the Webb Interdisciplinary Scientist ...
Astronomy
Apr 30, 2020
1
136
Astronomers have used the National Science Foundation's Karl G. Jansky Very Large Array (VLA) and NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope to make the first measurement of wind speed on a brown dwarf—an object intermediate in mass ...
Astronomy
Apr 9, 2020
3
1177
NASA's Wide Field Infrared Survey Telescope (WFIRST) will search for planets outside our solar system toward the center of our Milky Way galaxy, where most stars are. Studying the properties of exoplanet worlds will help ...
Astronomy
Mar 31, 2020
2
225
The path of a light beam is bent by the presence of mass, as explained by General Relativity. A massive body can therefore act like a lens—a so called "gravitational lens"—to distort the image of an object seen behind ...
Astronomy
Mar 30, 2020
16
493
Astronomers working on 'first light' results from a newly commissioned telescope in Chile made a chance discovery that led to the identification of a rare eclipsing binary brown dwarf system.
Astronomy
Mar 9, 2020
0
259
Citizen scientists have uncovered a bizarre pairing of two brown dwarfs, objects much smaller than the Sun that lack enough mass for nuclear fusion. The discovery, reported in The Astrophysical Journal and confirmed by a ...
Astronomy
Feb 12, 2020
1
193
A team of astronomers led by Brendan Bowler of The University of Texas at Austin has probed the formation process of giant exoplanets and brown dwarfs, a class of objects that are more massive than giant planets, but not ...
Astronomy
Feb 10, 2020
15
264
