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
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.
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 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