Institute for Research on Exoplanets

Surprise! When a brown dwarf is actually a planetary mass object

9 May 2017 Astronomy Now

Sometimes a brown dwarf is actually a planet — or planet-like anyway. A team of scientists in the United States and Canada have 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.

Brown dwarfs hiding in plain sight in our solar neighbourhood

7 September 2016 Astronomy Now

Brown dwarfs are sometimes called failed stars as they are too small to sustain the hydrogen fusion process that powers stars. Their temperatures can range from nearly as hot as a star to as cool as a planet and their masses also range between star-like and giant-planet-like. A near-infrared survey has discovered several ultracool brown dwarfs in the Sun’s vicinity.