Category: brown dwarf star

For a week or so specialty outlets and aggregators -  joined this morning by the NYTimes in a brief item - have carried news about a teeny telescope not technically so different from a high-end camera one might see in the media photo scrum at a baseball game. It discovered the transits, or face-crossings of stars by things orbiting them, of two objects sharing our general sector of the Milky Way. One is a hot Jupiter like planet. The other is an even hotter brown dwarf that is more massive than planets but hasn't the heft to generate sufficient internal temperature to light up like a genuine star. I read through some of the coverage this morning, and came away feeling ill-fed. Two...