by dougettinger » Tue May 11, 2010 4:01 pm
A recent paper presented the discovery of brown dwarfs within nine light-years from Earth that are barely hot enough to bake a potato - its temperature being 125 to 225 degrees Celsius. The smallest spectral class M (red dwarfs) have temperatures less than 3700 K. This places these dwarfs between .08 solar mass (not large enough for nuclear fusion) and 13 Jupiter masses (too small to fuse deuterium). Another recent discovery were exoplanets orbiting cool dwarf stars.
By either observation and/or theory what is possibly the smallest body that can be formed from a giant molecular cloud into a protostar disk and eventually into a dwarf star ? Does the current nebular hypothesis (by modeling) support these findings of the birth (in either isolation or as a binary) of such small dwarfs ?
One researcher claims brown dwarfs can form the same way as larger stars. Then I ask, "How small can we go in theory?"
Doug Ettinger
Pittsburgh, PA
A recent paper presented the discovery of brown dwarfs within nine light-years from Earth that are barely hot enough to bake a potato - its temperature being 125 to 225 degrees Celsius. The smallest spectral class M (red dwarfs) have temperatures less than 3700 K. This places these dwarfs between .08 solar mass (not large enough for nuclear fusion) and 13 Jupiter masses (too small to fuse deuterium). Another recent discovery were exoplanets orbiting cool dwarf stars.
By either observation and/or theory what is possibly the smallest body that can be formed from a giant molecular cloud into a protostar disk and eventually into a dwarf star ? Does the current nebular hypothesis (by modeling) support these findings of the birth (in either isolation or as a binary) of such small dwarfs ?
One researcher claims brown dwarfs can form the same way as larger stars. Then I ask, "How small can we go in theory?"
Doug Ettinger
Pittsburgh, PA