A mysterious object discovered near a brown dwarf doesn’t fit into any known astronomical category. The newly discovered mystery companion forms a binary system with the brown dwarf, located 460 light-years away in the Taurus star-forming system. The object is too light to be another brown dwarf, but it’s too young to have formed by accretion, the way a typical planet does. “Although this small companion appears to have a mass that is comparable to the mass of planets around stars, we don’t think it formed like a planet,” said astronomer Kevin Luhman of Penn State University, co-author of the study April 5 in The Astrophysical Journal. “This seems to indicate that there are two different ways for nature to make small companions.” Read the entire article: http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2010/04/mystery-space-object/#ixzz0kW9Syd2o |
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