ASTRO 801
Planets, Stars, Galaxies, and the Universe

Failed Stars: Brown Dwarfs

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Additional reading from www.astronomynotes.com


Astronomers realized decades ago that the star formation process does not always produce a star. In order for an object to become a star, it has to achieve hydrostatic equilibrium by generating energy via nuclear fusion in its core. Do all protostellar cores eventually get hot enough to ignite nuclear fusion? The answer is NO.

We will be reminded frequently that the property that is most important for stars is their mass. Inside of GMCs, the clumps that form stars have a range of masses, and the stars that eventually form can be as large as 100 times the mass of the Sun or as small as 1/10th the mass of the Sun. If a protostar has less than approximately 8% of the mass of the Sun (about 80 times the mass of the planet Jupiter), the temperature in the core will never reach a high enough point for the proton-proton chain to begin. Objects like this can be considered failed stars since they never achieve steady nuclear fusion in their core. They are usually referred to as brown dwarfs.

Recall that even before a protostar begins fusion, it is giving off light. This happens because the gravitational contraction is generating thermal energy inside the object. So, brown dwarfs do emit some light, however they are cool, so the peak of their spectrum is in the infrared. They are extremely faint, which makes them difficult to detect with all but the most sensitive telescopes. You may have seen in some of the images or external websites linked on previous pages that the standard list of spectral types (OBAFGKM) occasionally includes a few extra spectral types. Today, the most widely used set of stellar spectral types is OBAFGKMLT, and the last two classes, L and T, are the spectral types of brown dwarfs.

The direct observation of brown dwarfs is a relatively young area of study in astronomy. The object considered to be the first brown dwarf to be detected is Gliese 229B, and the press release at Hubblesite provides an excellent overview of that discovery. More recently, astronomers, including Professor Kevin Luhman of Penn State, have found many more objects they classify as brown dwarfs, but these faint, small, low mass objects remain difficult to detect.

Want to learn more?

There are many exciting discoveries of brown dwarfs that have been in the news lately, but here are three by Penn State's Kevin Luhman that you may wish to read: