Sign up for CNN’s Wonder Theory science newsletter. Explore the universe with news about fascinating discoveries, scientific advances and more. An object detected with the help of citizen scientists has been revealed to be moving so fast through the Milky Way that it was able to escape the galaxy’s gravity and reach intergalactic space. The… Read More »
When you buy through links in our articles, Future and its syndication partners may earn commission. An illustration shows a runaway brown dwarf escaping from a spiral galaxy. | Credit: Robert Lea (Created with Canva)/NASA A newly discovered stray stellar body may be a “failed star,” but it’s certainly not a failure when it comes… Read More »
Scientists directly imaged eight faint objects, including “failed stars,” also known as brown dwarfs, that accompany very bright stars in the Gaia data catalogue. Stars and their companions were first identified from the millions of stars in the Gaia catalogue. They were thought to be ideal for follow-up surveys with the ground-based GRAVITY instrument, an… Read More »
Using the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), astronomers have made the surprising discovery of methane emissions from a brown dwarf, or “failed star.” The finding suggests that the brown dwarf has auroras and may even be orbited by an undiscovered exomoon, the researchers said. The JWST brown dwarf discovery is surprising because these cold, isolated… Read More »
You should feel for the brown dwarfs. Not only has their failure to ignite like normal stars earned them the unfortunate nickname (fail stars), but new findings from the Hubble Space Telescope have revealed that they can’t even maintain a relationship together. Brown dwarfs are celestial bodies formed when giant clouds of gas and dust,… Read More »
Astronomers using NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) have detected a “failed star,” or brown dwarf, that shows signs of having an aurora. Auroras are more familiar as the northern and southern lights, which are caused by charged particles from the sun hitting molecules in the Earth’s atmosphere. They are usually only seen at high… Read More »
The central part of star cluster IC 348 as seen by JWST.NASA, ESA, CSA, STScI, K. Luhman (Penn State University) and C. Alves de Oliveira (ESA) NASA’s Webb telescope has detected what is likely the smallest brown dwarf ever observed. Brown dwarfs are some of the most unusual objects in the universe. They are not… Read More »