Carnegie Institution for Science | 2016 Aug 15
Brown dwarfs are smaller than stars, but more massive than giant planets. As such, they provide a natural link between astronomy and planetary science. However, they also show incredible variation when it comes to size, temperature, chemistry, and more, which makes them difficult to understand, too.Click to play embedded YouTube video.
New work led by Carnegie’s Jacqueline Faherty surveyed various properties of 152 suspected young brown dwarfs in order to categorize their diversity and found that atmospheric properties may be behind much of their differences, a discovery that may apply to planets outside the solar system as well. The work is published by The Astrophysical Journal Supplement Series.
Scientists are very interested in brown dwarfs, which hold promise for explaining not just planetary evolution, but also stellar formation. These objects are tougher to spot than more-massive and brighter stars, but they vastly outnumber stars like our Sun. They represent the smallest and lightest objects that can form like stars do in the Galaxy so they are an important "book end" in Astronomy.
For the moment, data on brown dwarfs can be used as a stand-in for contemplating extrasolar worlds we hope to study with future instruments like the James Webb Space Telescope. ...
Population Properties of Brown Dwarf Analogs to Exoplanets - Jacqueline K. Faherty et al
- Astrophysical Journal Supplement 225(1):10 (July 2016) DOI: 10.3847/0067-0049/225/1/10
arXiv.org > astro-ph > arXiv:1605.07927 > 25 May 2016