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Object Defies Categorization As Planet or Star

Posted by timothy on from the stella-incognito dept.

Kligat writes "The COROT project of the French Space Agency has detected an object described as defying categorization as a planet, star, or brown dwarf. Although only 0.8 times the radius of Jupiter, it is over 20 times as massive, giving it a density twice that of the metal platinum. If it is a star, it would be the smallest of those ever discovered."

5 of 119 comments (clear)

  1. It's a Dwarf! by flaming+error · · Score: 4, Informative
    From http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brown_dwarf:

    Brown dwarfs are sub-stellar objects with a mass below that necessary to maintain hydrogen-burning nuclear fusion reactions in their cores, as do stars on the main sequence, but which have fully convective surfaces and interiors, with no chemical differentiation by depth. Brown dwarfs occupy the mass range between that of large gas giant planets and the lowest mass stars; this upper limit is between 75[1] and 80 Jupiter masses (MJ). Currently there is some debate as to what criterion to use to define the separation between a brown dwarf from a giant planet at very low brown dwarf masses (~13 MJ ), and whether brown dwarfs are required to have experienced fusion at some point in their history. In any event, brown dwarfs heavier than 13 MJ do fuse deuterium and those above ~65 MJ also fuse lithium.
  2. Well, if it's not quite huge, but by davidsyes · · Score: 2, Informative

    And bigger than a burning Uranus, call it a stanet, or a plar...

    Actually, I was trying to be silly with Spoonerism, but, upon checking Google, sure enough, it has been done:

    http://www.futuresoon.com/2008/04/six-for-science_11.html

    And, done here, too:

    http://uplink.space.com/printthread.php?Cat=&Board=sciastro&main=570057&type=thread

    --
    Previously: "Linux... Toward the Sunrise..." Now: "Linux... Toward the-- No, now, part of Every Sunrise"
  3. FWIW: IANAAP by Goobermunch · · Score: 4, Informative

    Except that Dark Matter as we currently understand it is not simply matter that's "in the dark." Under current cosmological theory, regular baryonic matter, makes up only a small fraction of the universe, with dark matter (i.e., non-baryonic matter) making up some of the rest and dark energy making up approximately 70%.

    So while this object contributes to some of the missing mass in the universe, it's probably not the kind of thing that properly would be called dark matter.

    --AC

  4. Re:FSA? by Celandine · · Score: 3, Informative

    No. The French, Italians, Dutch etc all have their own space agencies in addition to ESA. (However I have never seen the acronym FSA used for the French one: it's the CNES, the Centre National d'Etudes spatiales.)

  5. Re:FSA? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Informative

    The French Space Agency? That's funny, I'm French and I didn't even know we had that. Don't they mean European rather than French? No it is french: it is the CNES (Centre National d'Etudes Spatiales).
    The COROT has been designed by a french team and launched by Soyouz end 2006.
    http://www.cnes.fr/web/652-corot.php (french website)

    And now, some jokes about Anonymous Cowards, and the french posts.