Two Brown Dwarfs And An EXO!!

 

There is something very exciting going on only a little over six light years from Sol.  Two Brown Dwarfs in a binary orbit seem to be harboring an exoplanet.   Exciting point one....Brown Dwarfs and in a binary orbit.  

Brown Dwarf stars are a curious animal.  First for a star, they are tiny.  For the most part hardly larger than a gas giant planet, in Luhman 16AB case, astronomers determined that the mass of these brown dwarfs is about 40 times that of Jupiter,  but very much smaller than a star.  Plus they are miserly with their energy putting out mostly infrared energy, some even so cool that if you could stand in the gravity, you could walk on the surface for the most part barefoot.  

But to find two in a binary orbit is a bit rare.  Whats more, it would seem that there is a planet in the mix as well.  

Discovered by astronomers using NASA’s Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE) spacecraft, Luhman 16AB is threefold more interesting as this system is only 6.6 light years away from Earth.  If further investigation confirms the previous findings, Luhman 16AB's planet would be the closest exoplanet yet discovered. 

More available on the Dvice.com article HERE

A Star Cooler than Boiling Water?

In a discovery that blurs the definition of what is a large planet and what is a small star comes a story from IO9 which details the discovery of a weird little beastie called a brown dwarf. We have known for some time that one of these strange little stars exists virtually in our backyard 63 light-years distant. But recently it's become clearer hows strange some of them are. Most of course are hardly larger than Jupiter. This means that Hydrogen fusion can not take place. (a mass 60 to 80 times the mass of Jupiter is needed) Brown dwarfs are often very dense animals. Though they may be about the size of Jupiter, they are many times more dense. It really is difficult to call them stars at all. The Spitzer telescope has uncovered a few brown dwarfs that are at most 16 Jupiter masses. Stranger still is their internal temperature is well below that of boiling water and one labeled WD 0806-661B may have a temperature of just 86 degrees Fahrenheit! How many hot days have you heard someone say "it's hotter than the surface of a star out today!" and now it could be a true statement! LOL.

Check out the rest of this weird article on the IO9 blog HERE

Mysterious Object Viewed in the Taurus star-forming system

Tell me this doesn't have science fiction written all over it. Check out the picture. On the right you have a mysterious object discovered near a brown dwarf doesn’t fit into any known astronomical category. It's in a binary system with the brown dwarf companion buuuuuuuuut
it’s too young to have formed by accretion, though it masses like a planet, evidence points towards or better away from the normal way planets form, and it too light to be another brown dwarf.

So at the very least the conventions held for planetary formation have to be re-examined. As
Kevin Luhman of Penn State University, recently said in The Astrophysical Journal. “This seems to indicate that there are two different ways for nature to make small companions.”

It gets weirder, read the complete Wired article here