Baby Brown Dwarf Twins Spotted by Astronomers

Brown dwarf stars, or "failed stars," are dim, cool and difficult to study at their most mature stage. Finding them in their infancy has been nearly impossible, and so knowing how they form has been a mystery.

But astronomers have their first good prospect -- twins, actually -- found in a dark cloud known as Barnard 213, which lies about 450 light-years from Earth in a region bursting with young objects.

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If confirmed, the discovery could solve the riddle of whether brown dwarfs form like stars from the gravitational collapse of gas clouds, or like planets, which pile up rocky material from a dust disc until they have the gravitational strength to attract gas as well.

"It comes down to mass and formation mechanisms," David Barrado, with the Centro de Astrobiologia in Madrid, Spain, told Discovery News.

Barrado's work is published in the September issue of Astronomy and Astrophysics.

The baby brown dwarfs are wrapped in a cocoon of dust, indicating a star-like formation process.

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If brown dwarfs form like stars, it raises the prospect that they could host planetary systems, said Michael Warner, project scientist with NASA's Spitzer infrared space telescope.

"It's conceivable that a brown dwarf could be closer than the nearest star," Warner told Discovery News.

The first brown dwarfs were discovered in 1995, setting off a debate about how they formed. Barrado and colleagues embarked on a methodical search for a young brown dwarf, hoping to resolve the debate.

They began by scrutinizing objects observed by NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope. Since brown dwarfs are dim, the team looked at objects that shined less than about one tenth of the sun's luminosity and were difficult to see.

From that candidate list, the researchers turned to other observatories to measure how much energy the objects were emitting. They used that to rule out other cosmic entities, such as distant galaxies and quasars.

"We got the data in different wavelengths so we could measure the proper motion," Barrado said. "(The candidate proto brown dwarf) is moving, just a tiny fraction, so we know it's not a galaxy."

Follow-up studies are under way to analyze the suspect baby brown dwarfs for chemical signatures and other properties.

"We're in the process of getting spectroscopy," Barrado said. "That will show us the fingerprints of these objects -- what is really there -- and will give us some additional clues about its real nature."