Storm-like Activity Found on Brown Dwarfs

Schwamm writes "Yesterday, scientists at NASA and UCLA announced that they had spotted storm-like activity on brown dwarfs, balls of gas larger than Jupiter and Saturn, but too small to burn hydrogen. These storms on the brown dwarfs make the Great Red Spot on Jupiter look like a 'small squall'. Here's another article at CNN."

Comments

Weather in brown dwarfs.

[Christopher Thomas]

I'd like to know more about the ones that are just above the brown dwarf level. Could something have terrestrial/Jovian style weather (wind, clouds, hurricanes) and also be fusing inside? That would be cool (hot).

Anything with a convective layer and a heat gradient should have weather, so yes, everything from moons-with-atmospheres on up through full-blown stars should have it.

The convective layer in red dwarfs is much deeper than in more energetic stars like the sun, as they're cooler (convective layer stops when the star material gets hot enough for radiative transmission to be the dominant heat transfer mechanism). Both still have them, though.

Winds and storms should be present aplenty, but clouds are a bit iffy. They should only happen where a phase transition is possible (e.g. from plasma to monatomic gas, and from monatomic gas to molecular gases). This would be right at or near the "surface" of a star (maybe deeper for a red dwarf).

Weather patterns would be very different from conventional weather in layers hot enough to be plasma, as plasma interacts strongly with the star's magnetic field. This region would be anything below a certain depth (i.e. most of the convective layers) and in the corona, for an active star.

Stars are neat :).