Tiny brown dwarf star found free-floating in space

Astronomers have been peering out in the direction of two star clusters recently, NGC 1333 and Rho Ophiuchi, and what they’ve been finding has been surprising.

For starters, scientists have found even more brown dwarfs recently in an already brown dwarf-cluttered area around NGC 1333 and Rho Ophiuchi. Brown dwarfs are quite common around the universe, but a large concentration of them – there are about half as many brown dwarf stars as there are normal stars in NGC 1333 – is a bit of an oddity.

“Brown dwarfs seem to be more common in NGC 1333 than in other young star clusters,” said Koraljka Muzic of the University of Toronto. “That difference may be hinting at how different environmental conditions affect their formation.”

A big cluster of brown dwarfs wasn’t the most surprising thing scientists found when peering out into the great beyond, however. Scientists discovered a brown dwarf that had only six times the mass of Jupiter which, in terms of brown dwarfs, is very, very small.

“Its mass is comparable to those of giant planets, yet it doesn’t circle a star,” said Aleks Scholz of the Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies in Ireland. “How it formed is a mystery.”

Brown dwarfs are failed stars – they’re much larger than planets (13-20 times the mass of Jupiter, on average) but they lack the required amount of mass to trigger internal nuclear fusion reactions that make a star tick.

Source: Space.com