🔄FROM THE ARCHIVE Volunteers scanning the night sky for elusive hints of Planet Nine are uncovering the secrets of a strange class of worlds called brown dwarfs.
Thanks to citizen scientists, astronomers have created a 3D map of 525 brown dwarfs near our sun — the most complete such list to date. The new research was made possible by thousands of volunteers working on NASA's Backyard Worlds project. Citizen Science Salon is a partnership betweenSometimes the old methods truly are the best methods.
On Tuesday, February 18, 1930, Tombaugh was flipping through recent images when he noticed a tiny dot that jumped back and forth, a sign that he’d found a nearby object. Further observational work ruled out other objects like asteroids, and the discovery of the onetime ninth planet was official. Today, Pluto has been demoted to the status of dwarf planet as we’ve discovered other objects like it in the Solar System.
Even further out in our celestial neighborhood there are likely to be a number of dim, mysterious objects known as brown dwarfs. Too large to be planets but not large enough to be stars, brown dwarfs are a strange kind of in-between object. They’re typically defined as being somewhere between 13 and 80 times the mass of Jupiter. The updated map includes 525 brown dwarfs within 65 light-years of Earth, but more are surely waiting out there.
Because they aren’t big enough to begin fusing hydrogen into helium — the process that powers our Sun and other stars — brown dwarfs are often quite cool, meaning they don’t emit a lot of radiation that astronomers can pick up on. Astronomers have found a wide variety of brown dwarfs that differ in terms of composition and internal activity. Still, many questions remain about how brown dwarfs form and what they look like. More observations are needed to get to the bottom of the mystery.
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