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Huge, Jupiter-Like Storm Rages On Cool 'Failed Star' (nasa.gov)

Posted by Soulskill on from the another-round-of-astronomy-headline-or-hollywood-headline dept.

astroengine writes: Jupiter's Big Red Spot is the largest example of a long-lived storm in the solar system, but now it has some pretty stiff competition in another star system. However, this "exo-storm" hasn't been spied on another gas giant, it's been spotted in the uppermost layers of a cool, small "failed star," or brown dwarf. Using three NASA space telescopes, new research published in The Astrophysical Journal has found that this spot isn't a starspot, but a bona fide storm that has more in common with Jupiter's famous cyclone. So is this really a failed star? Or is is an "overachieving planet"?

5 of 38 comments (clear)

  1. Wow ... by gstoddart · · Score: 5, Insightful

    In my lifetime the hunt for exoplanets has gone from "maybe we could find something if we did this" to "holy crap look at all this stuff" to "my god, it's full of storms".

    To all of the folks doing this stuff ... please, keep up the awesome.

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    Lost at C:>. Found at C.
    1. Re:Wow ... by gstoddart · · Score: 4, Informative

      It's full of false positives.

      False positives doesn't meant what you think it means. Finding a body which matches the criteria and then turns out to be either a pair of stars or a brown dwarf with a storm is NOT a false positive.

      It means something was detected, and it turned out to be something else we hadn't planned for, but according to the parameters got looked at.

      False positives is if you look at candidates and say "we have no idea why this is even on the list". This is actually finding stuff to look at, and then we realize it's something we'd not yet considered.

      That's science.

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      Lost at C:>. Found at C.
    2. Re:Wow ... by Coren22 · · Score: 2

      Personally, I would compare it to Columbus. He sailed the Atlantic to find the path to India. He didn't find India, but he found something interesting still.

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      APK likes to ask for responses to the same things over and over. Maybe he just likes the responses?
    3. Re:Wow ... by gstoddart · · Score: 2

      Yes, except in this case, the star actually dimmed, was identified as a candidate for dimming due to orbital transit of another body. On closer inspection, they found it dimmed not due to transit, but due to a storm.

      That's not a false positive. That's an actual match of the criteria which yielded a completely unexpected situation ... the same as happened with the binary stars.

      Finding that star is NOT a false positive, not by a long shot. The test result wasn't wrong, it just identified something nobody had even contemplated.

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      Lost at C:>. Found at C.
  2. Does it orbit another star? by Pfhorrest · · Score: 2, Interesting

    The only difference between a brown dwarf and a supergiant planet is that the latter orbits another star, while a brown dwarf is the largest thing in its star system. A brown dwarf basically is a supermassive planet, just a rogue one (not orbiting another star), so the question at the end of this summary is dumb.

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    -Forrest Cameranesi, Geek of all Trades
    "I am Sam. Sam I am. I do not like trolls, flames, or spam."