A group of Astronomers using NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope have identified the known tiny, free-floating brown dwarf with only three to four times the mass of Jupiter.
ANU Astrophysichist and Cosmologist Brad Tucker discusses the recent discovery with Sky News Australia.
“Brown dwarfs are quite mysterious because they condense down like stars do but they never get hot enough and dense enough to turn that gas into energy and turn that on into a star,” he told Sky News Australia.
“So they kind of almost fail as planets but yet they are obviously bigger than planets, but in a few of these cases, some of them are only three to four times the size of Jupiter.
“So it’s really kind of an object that straddles the border between is it a planet and is it a star.
“So studying this in detail is really important to kind of see the small objects that are hard to detect, but really mysterious and determining and telling us a lot about how those stars and planets come together.”
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