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Showing posts from April, 2020

The First Measurement of Wind Speeds on a Brown Dwarf

 Brown dwarfs are often quite rudely called "failed stars". That's too much pressure to put on any object, even though the reason they fail to be stars is the lack of pressure in their core, I want to ask these people though, are you doing a better job of becoming a star? Anyway let's get to topic here.  Brown dwarfs are classified as celestial objects between planets and stars. Their mass can range from around 13 times the mass of Jupiter, all the way up to 80 times, however that mass puts them just under the range of stars, as it is not enough for them to forge a dense enough core during their formation to fuse Hydrogen into Helium, and sadly that reaction is what makes a star a star. They can however, in the early ages after their formation, fuse Deuterium. Credit: NASA/JPL - Caltech  Deuterium is an isotope of Hydrogen, meaning it has the same number of protons but a different number of neutrons than a 'normal' Hydrogen atom, and ...