In another step towards identifying habitable worlds from the safety of Earth, astronomers have produced the first surface map of cloudy weather on a brown dwarf.
As a celestial body, a brown dwarf is a strange specimen – much more massive than a planet but too small for the nuclear fusion that will get stars to ignite in its core – making them all the more alluring for study.
Most brown dwarfs are much too far away for scientists to get any detailed analysis of them, but in March last year, Professor Kevin Luhman at Penn State picked out a brown dwarf system just 6.5 light years from the Sun – the third-closest system of objects to the Solar System.
Theorists have already suggested various scenarios of what weather patterns and surface features might be like on different worlds, but the telescopes and observatories necessary to confirm their ideas aren’t likely to exist for decades. Because the Luhmans are so close, they offer a way to build up information about weather patterns outside the Solar System...
Read the rest over on Forbes.
No comments:
Post a Comment