For centuries, astronomers faced the challenge of classifying objects in space based on their appearance. When observing an ...

Twirling pair Artist’s impression of Gliese 229Ba and Gliese 229Bb orbiting each other to create Gliese 229B. The brown dwarf pair orbit a cool M-dwarf star (shown in the distance) every 250 years.

Brown dwarfs are objects that straddle the dividing line between stars and planets. They form like stars, growing dense enough to collapse under their own gravity, but they never become dense and hot ...

Sometimes a brown dwarf is actually a planet — or planet-like anyway. A team led by Carnegie’s Jonathan Gagné, and including researchers from the Institute for Research on Exoplanets (iREx) at ...

Binary stars are known to transfer mass to one another. In extreme cases, mass transfer can even cause a supernova explosion.

A new study has been completed in an attempt to answer some of the questions surrounding brown dwarfs. A brown dwarf is an object with a mass between that of a planet and a star. One of the questions ...

At a recent annual meeting of the American Astronomical Society (AAS)—the largest organization of professional astronomers in the country—many cosmic objects got their moment to shine. In the case of ...

Image caption: This discovery image from the Gemini Observatory represents the closest brown dwarf companion ever directly imaged around a star (named LHS 2397a). This image was obtained on Feb. 7, ...

It's not quite a star, and it's not quite a planet — but it's soaring through the Milky Way, much closer than we thought. When you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate ...

The James Webb Space Telescope zoomed in on extremely faint objects, called brown dwarfs, in the Flame Nebula. Credit: NASA / ESA / CSA / STScI / M. Meyer (University of Michigan) There's a class of ...

Since the solar system formed over 4.5 billion years ago, planets and other objects have been subject to constant change due to heating from the Sun. But a new model developed by researchers from ...