Topic
Substellar objects that form from collapsing gas clouds like stars but lack enough mass to sustain hydrogen fusion, bridging stars and giant planets.
MIT-led astronomers found a star about 300 light-years away slowly pulling material off a brown dwarf companion, a process that could last billions of years. One detection shows slow stripping happens, and working out how common it is will need a larger sample of such pairs.
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Brittany Miles's team used 11 hours of JWST spectra to watch water clouds thicken and thin on WISE 0855, the coldest known brown dwarf. The same spectra separate those cloud changes from gases stirred up by convection, two signals that older photometry blended together.
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SPHEREx spectra of 37 brown dwarfs in The Astrophysical Journal trace water, carbon dioxide, carbon monoxide and methane across the full temperature range. Lead author Zafar Rustamkulov says models struggle to match objects whose clouds are thinning.
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Astronomers have watched a low-mass star strip a brown dwarf for the first time, in ZTF J0440+2325 about 300 light-years away, space.com reported. The pace is slow enough for the feeding to last up to billions of years.
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MIT-led astronomers say ZTF J0440+2325, 300 light-years away, is the first system seen where one low-mass object steadily feeds on another. Nobody has settled how long the feeding can last, and published estimates run from hundreds of thousands to billions of years.
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Webb spectra identified nine new brown dwarfs in the IC 348 nursery, the faintest estimated at about two Jupiter masses, a record low for the class. It is still open whether brown dwarf formation stops there or this survey simply could not see any fainter.
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Astronomers at Trinity College Dublin report that two components account for most of what changes in SIMP 0136's rotating spectrum, a decomposition they hope to refine for fainter brown dwarfs.
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Two years after the same team stopped at three to four Jupiter masses in this cloud, deeper Webb imaging and spectroscopy reached 0.19 percent of a solar mass, below where models of cloud collapse sit comfortably.
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