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Persistent Storm Detected On Low-Mass Star (latimes.com)

Posted by timothy on from the on-blitzen-and-kepler-and-spitzer-and-rudolph dept.

The L.A. Times reports that researchers using the Kepler and Spitzer space telescopes have discovered an astronomical first: a low-mass star with a huge, persistent, swirling surface feature akin to the long-lived storm on Jupiter. The star, W1906+40 , is cool enough ("a mere 3,500 degrees Fahrenheit or so") to allow cloud formation. A slice: This star was first spotted by NASA's Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (or WISE) in 2011; study leader John Gizis of the University of Delaware, Newark and colleagues then looked through NASA's Kepler data to further examine the star. (It just so happened that Kepler was pointing in the right direction to spot the L-dwarf.) ... "The long life of the cloud is in contrast with weather changes seen in cooler brown dwarfs on the timescale of hours and days," they wrote. In fact, the researchers believe the storm has been going strong for at least two years — a stability they seemed to find slightly baffling. "Evidently the W1906+40 spot is very long-lived compared to the 'weather' features in cooler L and T dwarfs," they wrote. "Why would the clouds in W1906+40 be stable?"

5 of 39 comments (clear)

  1. familiar by CrimsonAvenger · · Score: 2

    Seems to me I've seen this before....

    --

    "I do not agree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it"
    1. Re:familiar by ArmoredDragon · · Score: 2

      Even post Dice slashdot isn't immune to dupes I guess:

      http://science.slashdot.org/st...

  2. Wish we could image it. by jeffb+(2.718) · · Score: 2

    Sure, there's some long-baseline interferometry happening on Earth's surface, but I'd love to see imagers with a baseline spanning an AU or so.

  3. Re:Pictures? by Z00L00K · · Score: 2

    It's not possible to take pictures, but variations in emission can be analyzed and matched to known objects like Jupiter to allow for most likely explanation.

    It's not a perfect solution, but the best we have today.

    Now back to the drawingboard to try to figure out how to make a probe that can have warp drive capability.

    --
    If builders built buildings the way programmers wrote programs, then the first woodpecker would destroy civilization.
  4. Re:3,500 degrees Fahrenheit by jeffb+(2.718) · · Score: 2

    Yeah, but then again, I doubt many readers are actually familiar with the difference between 2000 degrees and 3500 degrees in either unit system. Chemists and metallurgists could nail it down pretty well -- hot enough to melt anything except carbon, but not to boil most of the interesting stuff beyond lead or zinc -- but, again, it would be lost on most readers.