07-13-2017, 04:05 PM
Lowest ever mass binary system discovered
When I started my career in astronomy, brown dwarfs were purely hypothetical as telescopes and instrumentation weren't sensitive enough to detect them. However, in the last couple od decades, such objects seem to be commonplace, with perhaps 100 billion of them in the Galaxy alone. However, most are observed as members of binary systems (which makes them easier to detect). Then there the oddballs, free-floating brown dwarfs which aren't part of a system; IIRC, UKIRT was the first to discover these objects.
Now the Kecks on MK have been used to discover what was thought to be a free-floating brown dwarf is actually a binary system consisting of two objects with a little less than four Jupiter masses each, making this the least massive binary system known. With such small masses, they are too small to undergo nuclear fusion in their cores and are heated mainly by the forces of gravitational collapse, just like Jupiter.
http://aasnova.org/2017/07/05/discovery-...le-planet/
When I started my career in astronomy, brown dwarfs were purely hypothetical as telescopes and instrumentation weren't sensitive enough to detect them. However, in the last couple od decades, such objects seem to be commonplace, with perhaps 100 billion of them in the Galaxy alone. However, most are observed as members of binary systems (which makes them easier to detect). Then there the oddballs, free-floating brown dwarfs which aren't part of a system; IIRC, UKIRT was the first to discover these objects.
Now the Kecks on MK have been used to discover what was thought to be a free-floating brown dwarf is actually a binary system consisting of two objects with a little less than four Jupiter masses each, making this the least massive binary system known. With such small masses, they are too small to undergo nuclear fusion in their cores and are heated mainly by the forces of gravitational collapse, just like Jupiter.
http://aasnova.org/2017/07/05/discovery-...le-planet/