Striped or Spotted? Planetary Scientists Solve a Brown Dwarf Mystery
Planetary scientists wondered if bands of winds or swirling storms dominated the atmospheres of brown dwarfs. University of Arizona-led research has solved the mystery. A…
Brown Dwarf
Brown Dwarf Discovered by Radio Telescope Observations for the First Time
Gemini North and IRTF Confirm LOFAR Discovery For the first time, astronomers have used observations from the LOFAR radio telescope, the NASA IRTF, operated by…
Nearly 100 Cool New Worlds Found in Our Cosmic Backyard With Key Help From Citizen Scientists
Citizen scientists and NOIRLab facilities key to discovery of almost 100 nearby cool brown dwarfs. How complete is our census of the Sun’s closest neighbors?…
Citizen Scientists Help Discover Two Bizarre Brown Dwarfs Using NASA’s NEOWISE
Data from NASA’s NEOWISE mission, managed by the agency’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, fuels the search for these not-quite-planets-but-not-quite-stars. With the help of citizen scientists, astronomers…
Astronomers Measure Wind Speed on a Brown Dwarf for the First Time
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…
NASA Measures Wind Speed on a Brown Dwarf 200 Trillion Miles Away
Not quite planets and not quite stars, brown dwarfs are cosmic in-betweeners. Learning about their atmospheres could help us understand giant planets around other stars….
Giant Exoplanets Form Differently Than ‘Failed Stars’ – Mass-ive Distinction
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…
Astronomers Measure Temperature Shift in Brown Dwarfs for the First Time
Brown dwarfs, the larger cousins of giant planets, undergo atmospheric changes from cloudy to cloudless as they age and cool. A team of astronomers led…
Astronomers Propose New Limit on the Definition of a Planet
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…
Hubble Telescope Discovers Substellar Objects in the Orion Nebula
In an unprecedented deep survey for small, faint objects in the Orion Nebula, astronomers using NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope have uncovered the largest known population…
James Webb Space Telescope to Investigate Mysterious Brown Dwarfs
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…
Astronomers Measure the Spin Rates of Stellar Companions
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…
Astronomers Explain the Varying Glow of Brown Dwarfs
Using data from NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope, astronomers reveal that the varying glow of brown dwarfs over time can be explained by bands of patchy…
Backyard Worlds Planet 9 Citizen Science Project Discovers a Brown Dwarf
The Backyard Worlds: Planet 9 Citizen Science Project has discovered its first substellar object, WISEA J110125.95+540052.8 – a T5.5 brown dwarf located approximately 34 pc…
Harvard Astronomers Examine Y-Type Brown Dwarfs
A newly published Harvard-Smithsonian study of the twenty-four known Y-dwarfs finds that the models for the coolest of them fail to explain the observed properties….
Astronomers Identify Massive 10 Billion Year Old Brown Dwarf
Astronomers have identified a brown dwarf that was formed about 10 billion years ago and is made of gas that is around 250 times purer…
First Direct Evidence of the Formation Process of Brown Dwarfs
Using the Very Large Array, an international team of astronomers has discovered jets of material ejected by still-forming young brown dwarfs, revealing the first direct…
Disproving the Predicted Brown Dwarf around V471 Tau
Using the new extreme-AO instrument SPHERE, researchers image the prototype eclipsing post-common envelope binary V471 Tau in search of the brown dwarf that is believed…