News
New insights into the formation of brown dwarfs
18 Feb 2022
A team led by LMU astrophysicist Basmah Riaz has detected a special methane compound outside the solar system for the first time.
Brown dwarfs are strange celestial bodies, occupying a kind of intermediate position between stars and planets. Astrophysicists sometimes call them "failed stars" because they have insufficient mass to burn hydrogen in their cores and shine like stars. It is continually debated if the formation of brown dwarfs is simply a scaled-down version of the formation of Sun-like stars. Astrophysicists are focusing on the youngest brown dwarfs, also called proto-brown dwarfs. They are only a few thousand years old and are still in the early formation stages. They want to know if the gas and dust in these proto-brown dwarfs resemble the composition of the youngest Sun-like proto-stars.