Slashdot Mirror
Brown Dwarf Hits Record Low
astroengine writes "The Keck II infrared telescope on Mauna Kea, Hawaii, has spotted what appears to be the coldest brown dwarf ever detected. Astronomers from the University of Hawaii have managed to constrain its temperature to just shy of 100 degrees Celsius. The object is part of a brown dwarf binary system and is estimated to be 6-15 times the mass of Jupiter. This is an exciting object as it could belong to a so-far theoretical 'Y' class of brown dwarf, a classification that makes objects like this cool example more planet-like than star-like."
After all, at the pressures we're talking about, water would be liquid well above 100 degrees C.
Lister better get back to work. The Dwarf should be RED!
we look up at the night sky and see only the bight stars, and assume everything else is vacuum. what if there is a relationship on the order of 100 invisible brown dwarf/ orphan jupiter planetary systems for every regular star system? or 1,000/1 or 10,000/1 or 100,000/1 or more?
i bet as we get better at trying to find exoplanets, we also find a lot of dead dark planetary systems out there. gravitationally bound, but completely without light. a jupiter, just sitting there all alone in the void, with its assemblage of moons/ planets, frozen, and without any light... but not rare at all, all over the place in fact and much more numerous than familiar ignited and main sequence star systems
i mean, star creation should assume a gaussian distribution in terms of star size, right? doesn't that just make simple entropic sense? well look at the wide base of that gaussian curve, below the minimum size needed for ignition: its huge! in overall mass and in number. so if the size spread of star systems is truly gaussian, then there should be orders of magnitude more dark systems out there than ignited systems. i bet we find legions of these systems, or, rather infer legions of them, and just never know for sure, because, of course, they are pitch dark and energetically completely dead
occlusion of other star systems would be the only way to see them. and even then, since they are so small and so far away, and occlusion would be once and probably not ever again, they would be much harder to find than exoplanets, unless they were close to our solar system. they would just become noise in the number of photons hitting earth
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
We can actually see some failed-to-form star systems as the massive dust trails that surround the nucleus of the Milky Way, and other galaxies.
Occasionally living proof of the Ballmer peak.
This question has lingered in the back of my mind for many years. How do we know there aren't 10^(some huge fucking number) planet-sized objects just floating out there in interstellar space? Assuming they're out there, then it would follow maybe there are 10^(some slightly smaller number) objects out there with a temperature/composition/etc. that's conducive to life of some kind.
If the numbers are right, maybe those candidates outnumber the candidates that orbit stars?
Eagles may soar, but weasels don't get sucked into jet engines.
It isn't terribly likely, the a-one requirement for life is some sort of energy gradient to cheat against entropy with.
Nerd rage is the funniest rage.
...as it could belong to a so-far theoretical 'Y' class of brown dwarf, a classification that makes objects like this cool example more planet-like than star-like.
I see what you did there.
The first sentence of the summary says they "spotted" the brown dwarf. This implies that it was out there and they observed it. The second sentence says that they managed to "constrain" its temperature. This implies that they have control over its temperature. I think that if they have found a way to control the temperature of a brown dwarf (or any other star) that is bigger news than that this is the coolest brown dwarf they have found.
The truth is that all men having power ought to be mistrusted. James Madison
So if the Keck telescope is sensitive enough to detect a (star? large planet?) sized object that is radiating at only at 100c, could it pick up Dyson Spheres? Ringworlds? (But perhaps ringworlds would be more easily detected using transit studies! And, yes I know that they are dynamically unstable!)
i mean, star creation should assume a gaussian distribution in terms of star size, right? doesn't that just make simple entropic sense?
Since you can't have negative mass, an exponential distribution makes more sense (and is the maximum entropy distribution.) AFAIK, and someone please tell me if I'm wrong, the mass distribution of observed, ignited stars is approximately exponential. This would fit your hypothesis since the exponential distribution is "memoryless," i.e. if you chop off the lower portion of the curve you still have the same distribution.
The correlation between ignorance of statistics and using "correlation is not causation" as an argument is close to 1.
"If it didn't ignite, it's not a star - then technically it doesn't even belong on the chart of star sizes."
you are just being legalistic, not making a valid statement which counteracts what i am saying. plus you are talking about galaxies... huh? this is phenomena on a vastly different scale than that is star and planetary system formation
the simple truth is, whenever a star/ planetary system forms, you are talking about a certain amount of mass in the region that serves as a starting point. after some time, you have a central gravitational focus, with various objects in orbit. whether or not one or two or more of those objects ignite, is simply a function of mass. and therefore, it is entirely reasonable and plausible to hypothesize that there exists a whole class of systems out there that, simply because nothing ignited, we aren't aware of them. then it is equally valid to say that there may be vastly more of such brown and dark systems than systems we can see, simply as a function of random chance and the distribution of possible amounts of mass in a region where gravity started acting and leading us down the path towards star/ planetary system
you've brought nothing but a bunch of legalistic and off topic issues, you haven't refuted or even touched what i am saying
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
i am not describing any of those things. i understand the debate about matter and dark matter and other exotic things we can't see in the universe, and a number of exotic possibilities about where "missing" matter might or might not exist
but i am talking about a more mundane, simplistic issue about star formation and the possibility of a huge amount of "failed" star systems out there
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
If the ring is even the slightest bit uncentered, then it will become more and more uncentered over time, moving in a hula-hoop like rotation around the sun until it eventually touches the sun. You need an active repositioning system to prevent this from happening (like Niven introduced in later books).
http://testservice-eprints.gla.ac.uk/38/1/JIBS_C_McInnes_56_308.pdf
that has nothing to do with this concept. its like saying plate tectonics influences boulder size in a creek bed. of course, plate tectonics raised the mountains that made the creek, but the boulders in that creek are dictated by wind, water, erosion, the composition of rocks in the area, etc. all you have is a "far out man, everything is connected" platitude, and nothing at all to say about the mass of planetary systems
take a count of the largest stars. then just the large stars. the medium sized... you are increasing in number, right? you are at the front of a gaussian curve. now the numbers start falling as you get smaller and smaller. you have a curve with a rapid drop off on the smaller side. my hypothesis is simply that this is artificial because we simply can't see the dimmer and totally dark systems out there
that you are only looking at the visible top edge of a much larger gaussian curve of star/ planetary system size, where non-ignited stars (i know, legalistically those are not called stars, but you get my point despite your legalisms) make up a large unseen portion of the curve. that what we see is only the edge of a much larger gaussian distribution. it is a function of what is visible versus what is true, and the disconnect between these two simply because smaller systems are unignited, but still sitting out there, dark and cold
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Actually something like that very question has been asked...
Back when we first started to get a handle on galactic evolution, somebody noticed that the amount of visible (luminous, that is visible to telescopes, radio telescopes, etc..) matter in galaxies was not enough to account to the visible effects of gravity on galaxies. One of the first hypotheses they though of was that there must be a lot of invisible (non luminous) matter floating around - then somebody calculated that the amount of invisible (non luminous) matter required would in fact *be* visible, because it would obscure the stars.
This kicked off the search for dark matter.
So while there may be such bodies, the lack of observed gravitational effects, that they've never been observed to occult any stars under observation, and that none appear visible by the reflected light of out own Sun, gives an upper bound to how many there are likely to be. Further studies of the Oort cloud and the Scattered disk could refine that estimate, because if they exist they'll perturb the objects in those belts as they pass by.