Observations May Offer Insight into the Atmospheres of Giant Planets
Brown dwarfs are the cosmic equivalent of tweeners. They're too massive to be planets and too small to sustain nuclear fusion in their cores, which powers stars. Many brown dwarfs are nomadic. They do not orbit stars but drift among them as loners.
Astronomers would like to know how these wayward objects are put together. Do they share any kind of kinship with bloated gas-giant planets like Jupiter? Studying brown dwarfs is much more difficult than studying nearby Jupiter for making comparisons. We can send spacecraft to Jupiter. But astronomers need to look across many light-years to peer down into a brown dwarf's atmosphere.
Researchers used the giant W. M. Keck Observatory in Hawaii to observe a nearby brown dwarf in infrared light. Unlike Jupiter, the young brown dwarf is still so hot it glows from the inside out, and looks like a carved Halloween pumpkin. Because the brown dwarf has scattered clouds, light shining up from deep down in the dwarf's atmosphere fluctuates, which the researchers measured. They found that the dwarf's atmosphere has a layer-cake structure with clouds having different composition at different altitudes.
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