There are a lot of stars in this Universe. And we mean…A LOT. And scientists have categorized them according to size, temperature, and brightness.
Scientists have also discovered a mysterious object that has changed our perspective on things. They have named it “The Accident,” and it’s a brown dwarf – which is known for being failed stars. But the thing is that it is so different than what we’ve seen so far – quite confusing, may we add. It might be as old as the Universe. Usually, brown dwarfs are younger, but this means that there could be an entire population of old ones and that we missed them since they look so different.
Brown dwarfs are usually found between the biggest planets and the smallest stars. They form from the same model as stars do – top-down cloud-collapse. This is what happens when the process of star formation ends before the object gets enough mass to start the fusion of hydrogen in the core. But the thing is that they are massive enough to fuse something called deuterium (heavy hydrogen). So, of course, brown dwarfs are smaller, icier, and dimmer than most of the stars out there.
These brown dwarfs have a mass range that is between 13 and 80 times the mass of Jupiter. It’s interesting how they cool as they age.
Up until now, scientists have found 2000 of these objects in the Milky Way. But The Accident was nowhere to be found since it does not fit the characteristics of a normal brown dwarf. NASA’s Near-Earth Object Wide-Field Infrared Survey Explorer simply found it by accident. And we’re glad it did. It’s a bizarre object, and it is pretty old. In some wavelengths, it glows more brightly, which means that it has a higher temperature.
