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The exotic weather of a brown dwarf

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Using Spitzer space telescopes and NASA’s Hubble, astronomers have probed the stormy atmosphere of a brown dwarf, creating the most detailed “weather map” for this class of objects that are not stars, but it is difficult to characterize planets at least in some respects.

2MASSJ22282889-431 026

Brown dwarfs are formed from the condensation of gas, as do the stars, but lack sufficient mass to fuse hydrogen atoms and energy. These objects, some call failed stars, planets resemble the gas giants, but because of its greater mass have special features.

The team of Daniel Apai, Esther Buenzli and Adam Showman of the University of Arizona in the United States, and Mark Marley of NASA, simultaneously pointed Hubble and Spitzer to a brown dwarf with the long name 2MASSJ22282889-431 026. Found that their brightness varies over time. Its brightness increases and decreases every 90 minutes while turning. But the most surprising thing is that the team also found that this cycle of change in brightness was not the same at all wavelengths.


These variations indicate the presence of different layers of material orbiting the brown dwarf masses of storm clouds forming as large as the Earth itself, driven by fierce winds. The Spitzer and Hubble look different atmospheric layers of this strange world because certain infrared wavelengths are blocked by water vapor and methane at high altitude, while other infrared wavelengths emerge from deeper layers.


Unlike water clouds on Earth or Jupiter’s ammonia clouds, clouds in brown dwarfs known often composed of sand grains hot, liquid iron drops and other exotic compounds. Although brown dwarfs are cold compared to the stars themselves, their temperatures are often very steamy if we take the gas giant planets in our solar system and even the Earth.

2MASSJ22282889 temperature-431026 is approximately between 600 and 700 degrees Celsius (1,100 to 1,300 degrees Fahrenheit). Analysis of storm clouds suggests that brown dwarf are like giant versions of Jupiter’s Great Red Spot, a huge storm that has been active for the last two or three centuries.


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