Cold Brown Dwarf tagged posts

New research has led to the first direct discovery of a cold brown dwarf from its radio wavelength emission. Along with paving the way for future brown dwarf discoveries, this result is an important step towards applying radio astronomy to the exciting field of exoplanets.

A collaboration between the LOw Frequency ARray (LOFAR) radio telescope in Europe, the Gemini North telescope, and the NASA InfraRed Telescope Facility (IRTF), both on Maunakea in Hawai’i, has led to the first direct discovery of a cold brown dwarf from its radio wavelength emission. Along with paving the way for future brown dwarf discoveries, this result is an important step towards applying radio astronomy to the exciting field of exoplanets.

For th...

1. A brown dwarf can give off some light, allowing scientists — professional or volunteer — to search for the object as it moves across the sky.
Chuck Carter and Gregg Hallinan/Caltech/NASA
2. This gif shows the ‘flipbook’ from which citizen scientists identified the new brown dwarf, marked with the red circle.
Credit: NASA

A new citizen-science tool released earlier this year to help astronomers pinpoint new worlds lurking in the outer reaches of our solar system has already led to a discovery: a brown dwarf a little more than 100 light years away from the Sun. Just 6 days after the launch of the Backyard Worlds: Planet 9 website in February, 4 different users alerted the science team to the curious object, whose presence has since been confirmed via an infrared telescope...