The first brown dwarf ever found was the strangest – now we know why

 

Image courtesy of K. Miller, R. Hurt/Caltech/IPA.C

Joel Kontinen  

The first brown dwarf was a mystery, but it is not a single star. God can make what He did  in surprising ways.

”An odd star that has confused researchers for decades now makes sense – it turns out not to be a single star but two companions.

“It used to be that this brown dwarf didn’t make any sense. We worried that we were doing something horribly wrong, or that our models were horribly wrong. But, no, everything’s fine. It just has a friend,” says Timothy Brandt at the Space Telescope Science Institute in Maryland

Now, two research teams have used instruments at the W. M. Keck Observatory in Hawaii and the Very Large Telescope in Chile to unravel the mystery of the first brown dwarf.

Brown dwarfs are “failed stars” in that they have too little matter and are too cool to sustain nuclear 2fusion. They become faint in the night sky, similar to planets, instead of burning bright for millennia. The first brown dwarf, called Gliese 229B, was discovered in 1995, but its mass was inexplicably large, says Jerry Xuan at the California Institute of Technology, who worked on one of the studies.”

Source:

Karmela Padavic-Callaghan, 2024 The first brown dwarf ever found was the strangest – now we know why | New Scientist 16 October.