Topic > The Discovery of “Brown Dwarfs” in Space

We will talk about how astronomers found brown dwarfs nearby with the help of NASA's James Webb Space Telescope. Brown dwarfs have an obvious difference between planets and stars that calls into question everything we've theorized about them. Many astronomers will use Webb to take a closer look at both star formation and exoplanet atmospheres because brown dwarfs fall in between. The older Hubble, Spitzer and ALMA telescopes have shown that brown dwarfs can be up to 70 times larger than gas planets like Jupiter, but they don't have enough mass for their cores to burn fuel and produce light. Although brown dwarfs were theorized in 1995, there is no explanation for how they form. Like a star or like a planet? Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on "Why Violent Video Games Shouldn't Be Banned"? Get an original essay Scientists believe there is a middle ground. Some brown dwarfs live next to other stars, others drift alone. Brown dwarfs are small, faint and gaseous. At the University of Montreal, Étienne Artigau has a team that is using Webb to investigate a brown dwarf called SIMP0136. It is one of the closest to our Sun, which makes it easier to study. It has many traits of a planet without being too blinding like starlight. SIMP0136 was the same brown dwarf used some time ago for another scientific discovery by his team, when they discovered it had a cloudy atmosphere. They will use Webb to find out what's in the clouds. Additionally, Webb has probe characteristics, such as water absorption, that are inaccessible from the ground at this level of precision,” Artigau said. That's why they need the web in space, outside our atmosphere. These functions could eventually tell us which bodies in space could support life. All of these functions are techniques known as transit spectroscopy. SIMP0136 has a similar temperature to other planets that will be studied in Webb transit spectroscopy. Searching for solitary, low-mass brown dwarfs was one of the first science goals made for the Webb telescope in the 1990s, said astronomer Aleks Scholz of the University of St. Andrews. Brown dwarfs have a lower mass than stars and have low luminosity, so they are best seen in infrared light, which is why they need Webb for this research. Some brown dwarfs are not much heavier than Jupiter. It has been difficult for astronomers to find brown dwarfs that are less than five times the mass of Jupiter, the mass at which star and planet formation blur together. That's why they need the Webb telescope, because it can do things that other telescopes can't do.