Brown dwarfs are formed when a newborn star does not have enough mass to ignite the nuclear fusion of hydrogen. This is their essential difference to giant gas planets - brown dwarfs form quasi first and in the center of the system, gas giants follow later. As central objects of their system, brown dwarfs naturally inherit the rotation of the protostellar cloud. But some of them apparently give extra gas later. Astronomers at Western University in Canada have now discovered three brown dwarfs that spin faster than any previously found, coming close to the theoretical maximum speed. The astronomers…

Luhman-16 B is a brown dwarf - a star that was a little too small to actually become a star and ignite hydrogen fusion in its interior. Brown dwarfs are about the size of Jupiter, but typically dozens of times more massive. Luhman-16 B, along with its brother Luhman-16 A, is the closest to Earth of this type of celestial object. It is also the target of the "Majestic Dracht" in Proxima log 2. Because of their nature - they do not glow - brown dwarfs are quite difficult to observe. Only with the right tricks can researchers find…

Star formation processes sometimes give rise to astronomical objects called brown dwarfs. They are smaller and colder than stars, and in the most extreme cases can have masses and temperatures down to those of exoplanets. Like stars, brown dwarfs often wander through space alone, but they can also appear in binary systems, where two brown dwarfs orbit each other and travel together in the galaxy. Researchers led by Clémence Fontanive of the Center for Space and Habitability (CSH) at the University of Bern have now discovered a curious starless binary system of brown dwarfs. The system, CFHTWIR-Oph 98 (or…

Brown dwarfs are celestial objects that were a little bit too small to develop into proper stars. That doesn’t mean that they can’t be hot – under some circumstances, fusion reactions can still take place inside them just like in our Sun, only at a smaller extent or with different initial products, such as deuterium instead of hydrogen. For astronomers, they are very interesting, because they might offer any planets orbiting them even better chances of life than for larger red dwarfs, which, unfortunately, tend to have strong outbursts of radiation. Brown dwarfs, on the other hand, are relatively…