This unusual system 'shouldn't exist.'
planet. What’s wild about this particular new—and very real—binary is just how small it is. “This system shouldn’t exist,” says, an astronomer at the American Museum of Natural History not involved in the new research.
The brown dwarf completes one lap of its parent star in just under two hours, about the time it takes Popinchalk to commute from Brooklyn to his Manhattan office and back. “I would have been skeptical of the system,” he adds, but the authors have collected “an impressive amount of data” using multiple telescopes and techniques to support this discovery.“The orbit is much tighter than any previously discovered brown dwarf binaries,” says lead author, an astronomer at Caltech.
Binary systems are an important tool for astronomers to understand stars more generally. Thanks to the gravitational interactions between the two components, researchers can measure mass, radius, and temperature and other key properties more reliably and accurately for binaries than they can when observing lone stars.
This particular newly discovered brown dwarf, which is about 80 times the mass of Jupiter, is on the cusp of being massive enough to be a star. Studying it in particular can help astronomers unravel how these intermediate objects came to be. “The way brown dwarfs form still has several big question marks around it, and each brown dwarf/low-mass star binary system is an important laboratory to answer these questions,” says Popinchalk.
The authors propose the shrinking orbit could be caused by magnetic braking, where energetic particles from a star are funneled through its magnetic field, robbing the star of energy. Existing models assume that magnetic braking doesn’t work for small stars, but it looks like it must be operating here.
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