Press release from yesterday:
"UH discovery on Maunakea sheds light on brown dwarfs"
"Astronomers at the University of Hawaiʻi have precisely measured the age of a nearby Sun-like star and its unusual companion, known as a brown dwarf, an object that falls between a planet and a star. The discovery offers new clues into how brown dwarfs grow and change over time."
Basically, the age of a main-sequence star like our own sun has been measured. Main-sequence stars are very well understood, especially as we have one in our solar system, so this one was estimated to be about 2.3 billion years old. That means the objects orbiting it are also the same age and one of those objects is a brown dwarf, essentially a failed star because it isn't massive enough to initiate nuclear fusion in its core.
In general, the more massive a star is, the shorter its lifetime. When you get to the other end of the scale, the lifetimes are long and much harder to determine because the uncertainty increases. For brown dwarfs, that uncertainty is high unless you know when it was "born," so now we have a scale since this one formed 2.3 billion years ago.
"UH discovery on Maunakea sheds light on brown dwarfs"
"Astronomers at the University of Hawaiʻi have precisely measured the age of a nearby Sun-like star and its unusual companion, known as a brown dwarf, an object that falls between a planet and a star. The discovery offers new clues into how brown dwarfs grow and change over time."
Basically, the age of a main-sequence star like our own sun has been measured. Main-sequence stars are very well understood, especially as we have one in our solar system, so this one was estimated to be about 2.3 billion years old. That means the objects orbiting it are also the same age and one of those objects is a brown dwarf, essentially a failed star because it isn't massive enough to initiate nuclear fusion in its core.
In general, the more massive a star is, the shorter its lifetime. When you get to the other end of the scale, the lifetimes are long and much harder to determine because the uncertainty increases. For brown dwarfs, that uncertainty is high unless you know when it was "born," so now we have a scale since this one formed 2.3 billion years ago.