LP 944-20: A Failed Star Flares
13.07.2000

The tiny spot circled on the right actually represents a big astronomical discovery -- the first detected flare from a failed star. Failed stars, termed brown dwarfs in astronomers' parlance, are too low in mass to ignite nuclear hydrogen burning in their cores, yet

The Coldest Brown Dwarf
30.08.2011

This cosmic snapshot composed with image data from NASA's Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE) satellite captures a multitude of faint stars and distant galaxies toward the constellation Lyra at wavelengths longer than visible light. But the object circled at the center is not quite a star.

Free Floating Planets In Orion
31.03.2000

This false-colour image of the young Trapezium star cluster in the Orion Nebula was made with an infrared camera at wavelengths about twice as long as visible light. The infrared data are part...

Brown Dwarf Gliese 229B
24.03.1999

The spot near the bottom is an image of an unusual type of object: a brown dwarf. A brown dwarf is sometimes called a "failed star" because it does not have enough mass to shine by nuclear fusion.

Small Star
20.11.1999

A dim double star system cataloged as Gliese 623 lies 25 light-years from Earth, in the constellation of Hercules. The individual stars of this binary system were distinguished for the first time when the Hubble Space Telescope's Faint Object Camera recorded this image in June 1994.

Methane Dwarf
3.06.1999

While hunting through Sloan Sky Survey data in search of distant quasars, Princeton astronomers Xiaohui Fan and Michael Strauss came upon an undiscovered type of object very nearby - now dubbed a methane dwarf. Marked...

The Brown Dwarfs of Orions Trapezium
30.08.2000

The bright stars above are well known as heart of the Trapezium, an open cluster of stars in the center of the Orion Nebula. The many dim objects, however, are not well known, and have come to attention only on recent images in infrared light.

GL 229B: An Elusive Brown Dwarf?
4.12.1995

What type of matter makes up most of the universe? This question is arguably the most perplexing astronomical mystery of our time. A leading candidate is a type of dim, low mass star called a "brown dwarf" star.