Carnegie: Brown Dwarf Is Actually a Planetary Mass Object

Find out the latest thinking about our universe.
Post Reply
User avatar
bystander
Apathetic Retiree
Posts: 21571
Joined: Mon Aug 28, 2006 2:06 pm
Location: Oklahoma

Carnegie: Brown Dwarf Is Actually a Planetary Mass Object

Post by bystander » Tue May 09, 2017 4:11 pm

Surprise! Brown Dwarf Is Actually a Planetary Mass Object
Carnegie Institution for Science | 2017 May 09
[img3="An artist’s conception of SIMP J013656.5+093347, or SIMP0136 for short, which the research team determined is a planetary like member of a 200-million-year-old group of stars called Carina-Near. Image is courtesy of NASA/JPL, slightly modified by Jonathan Gagné."]https://carnegiescience.edu/sites/carne ... maller.jpg[/img3][hr][/hr]
Sometimes a brown dwarf is actually a planet—or planet-like anyway. A team led by Carnegie’s Jonathan Gagné, and including researchers from the Institute for Research on Exoplanets (iREx) at Université de Montréal, the American Museum of Natural History, and University of California San Diego, discovered that what astronomers had previously thought was one of the closest brown dwarfs to our own Sun is in fact a planetary mass object. ...

Smaller than stars, but bigger than giant planets, brown dwarfs are too small to sustain the hydrogen fusion process that fuels stars and allows them to remain hot and bright for a long time. So after formation, brown dwarfs slowly cool down and contract over time. The contraction usually ends after a few hundred million years, although the cooling is continuous. ...

The team determined that a well-studied object known as SIMP J013656.5+093347, or SIMP0136 for short, is a planetary like member of a 200-million-year-old group of stars called Carina-Near. ...

SIMP J013656.5+093347 is Likely a Planetary-Mass Object in the Carina-Near Moving Group - Jonathan Gagné et al
Know the quiet place within your heart and touch the rainbow of possibility; be
alive to the gentle breeze of communication, and please stop being such a jerk.
— Garrison Keillor

Post Reply