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NASA Space

Volunteers Spot Almost 100 Cold Brown Dwarfs Near Our Sun (space.com) 36

Posted by BeauHD from the lost-and-found dept.
Citizen scientists have spotted almost 100 of our sun's nearest neighbors. Space.com reports: In a new study, members of the public -- including both professional scientists and volunteers -- discovered 95 brown dwarfs (celestial objects too big to be considered planets and too small to be considered stars) near our sun through the NASA-funded citizen science project Backyard Worlds: Planet 9. They made this discovery with the help of astronomers using the National Science Foundations National Optical-Infrared Astronomy Research Laboratory. Brown dwarfs are unusual celestial objects -- much heavier than planets but not massive enough to become stars. The celestial objects can be seriously hot (think thousands of degrees Fahrenheit), but these 95 newly-discovered neighbors are surprisingly cool. Some of these weird worlds are even relatively close to Earth's temperature and could be cool enough to have water clouds in their atmospheres, according to the statement.
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Volunteers Spot Almost 100 Cold Brown Dwarfs Near Our Sun More

Volunteers Spot Almost 100 Cold Brown Dwarfs Near Our Sun

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  • Not that close (Score:5, Informative)

    by MichaelSmith ( 789609 ) on Saturday August 22, 2020 @02:14AM (#60428963) Homepage Journal

    [1] The closest of these new discoveries is roughly 23 light-years away from the Sun. Many more of these brown dwarfs are in the 30–60 light-year distance range.

    • Re:Not that close (Score:4, Funny)

      by Tom ( 822 ) on Saturday August 22, 2020 @02:46AM (#60428979) Homepage Journal

      By cosmic standards, that's basically right on top of us.

      Also, has anyone already checked the hyperway express route planning details that are on Alpha Centauri?

      • Its not as interesting though because there are bound to be plenty of exoplanets orbiting stars within 23 light years. A brown dwarf inside a tenth of a light year though...

        • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

          by lgw ( 121541 )

          A massive object passing that close undetected isn't impossible, but it is unlikely because it would probably disturb the Oort cloud enough to send more comets than usual inwards.

          Apparently from study of impact craters we know that a star passes close enough to send a rain of comets in quite frequently by astronomical timescales. The last one, a small red dwarf, was only 50k years ago, so it will be 2M years or so until that wave of comets reaches the inner system. It was probably visible to early man dur

        • Star systems and brown dwarfs out to 16 light years (5 parsecs, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]): 53, if I counted correctly. (I counted systems, i.e. Alpha Centauri A, Alpha Centauri B and Proxima Centauri count as one.) Another 62 from 16 to 20 light years out (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_star_systems_within_16%E2%80%9320_light-years). Another 35 or so out to 23 light years (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_star_systems_within_20%E2%80%9325_light-years). I believe most of the nearest

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by Sloppy ( 14984 )

        Also, has anyone already checked the hyperway express route planning details that are on Alpha Centauri?

        I started looking into it, but I'm afraid of leopards.

    • The secondary articles really missed the distinction between astronomical scale and peoples general conceptions. The quote here is a footnote in a secondary article from the link.

      Near to the sun, would generally mean at least nearer to the sun than I am right now, not way way further from the sun than I am right now. The article authors should have described the distance with a better term than "near".

      • No your near is too near, I would have considered anything within Oort cloud distance, things bound to the sun (out to as much as about 1.5 light year in theory), as "near".

      • Near to the sun, would generally mean at least nearer to the sun than I am right now, not way way further from the sun than I am right now.

        This just shows your reading comprehension isn't very good, and you make an excess of needless assumptions to try to smooth things over.

        When you turn on a radio, and they talk about something being near to a city, is the context you? Or does the context include the something, and the city, but not your location at all?

        When a sportsball announcer says, "That play nearly succeeded!" do you think they're comparing how good the play was to if you had done it, or is it near to something else?

        Near to the Sun in i

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by dgatwood ( 11270 )

          When you turn on a radio, and they talk about something being near to a city, is the context you? Or does the context include the something, and the city, but not your location at all?

          That depends on whether the listener is near that city. If so, and if the event is ridiculously far from the listener, one would expect laughter at the claim that it was near the city.

          I'm in Sunnyvale. That's near San Jose. If the news talked about something in Antarctica and said that it was near San Jose, I'd be baffled, because from any sane frame of reference, that is not true, and from a frame of reference far enough away for it to be true, describing it in terms of San Jose makes no sense, because

    • These things should be extremely common, given that 90% of matter required according to the standard model is still invisible to us. There are probably cold black holes as well.

      • Dark matter isnâ(TM)t just dust and planets and other matter we donâ(TM)t see because it isnâ(TM)t being illuminated. It is a fundamentally different type of matter that doesnâ(TM)t interact with the electromagnetic force (like neutrinos) and therefore cannot be seen.

  • Also... (Score:2, Funny)

    by garryknight ( 1190179 )

    The largest of them, named Dopey, claimed to have spotted more than any of the other scientists.

  • I doubt it (Score:1, Redundant)

    by nospam007 ( 722110 ) *

    They are not brown dwarfs, they are height-challenged, over-tanned suns.

  • Dark matter? (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Antique Geekmeister ( 740220 ) on Saturday August 22, 2020 @07:30AM (#60429227)

    I've been pointing out, for decades now, that "dark matter" in cosmology does not mean "non-baryonic". The complex models of unobserved and undetected matter of the various 11-dimensional, curled up, string, and other exotic matter theories without experimental prediction or validation were conjured to explain matter, "dark matter", that is deduced on galactic and and universal scales but which does not show up in our detected astronomy. The startling number of cool or cold dense objects in even solar proximity could well explain this if these are common place. They are cool or cold, dense, and thus would not violate Olber's Paradox.

    • Re:Dark matter? (Score:4, Interesting)

      by smoofsmith ( 1967406 ) on Saturday August 22, 2020 @09:14AM (#60429395)
      So are brown dwarfs ubiquitous, occurring in sufficient numbers to account for an appreciable amount of the ‘dark matter’ in the galaxy? Studies are ongoing, but the three major ones that have already been completed indicate that the answer is no. The MACHO Project (Massive Astrophysical Compact Halo Object, a term for large astronomical bodies that can explain what seems to be dark matter in galactic haloes), along with the EROS and OGLE collaborations, all involved studies of the Small and Large Magellanic Clouds, satellite galaxies to our own Milky Way. Using stars in the LMC and SMC as light sources, the teams observed the stars for several years and looked for the kind of lensing events that would indicate the presence of a dark object between the star and the observer. The MACHO and EROS teams announced the detection of three MACHOs as far back as September of 1993. That was after looking at 1.8 million stars for one year (MACHO) and 3 million stars for three years (EROS). By the end of the decade, the teams had a combined score of about twenty microlensing events. The final paper of the MACHO collaboration, published in 2000, concluded that a Galactic halo consisting entirely of MACHOs was now ruled out, and estimated that about 20% of the Galactic halo was in the form of MACHOs. The EROS team preferred to present its results as an upper limit on the number of MACHOs in the halo, with no more than about 8% of the halo in MACHOs having masses of about one-tenth to one times the mass of the Sun. A combined analysis of the two experiments showed that, within the uncertainties of each experiment, they are consistent with each other and that less than 20% of the halo is in the form of MACHOs. MACHOs, the least exotic candidates for dark matter, have now been effectively ruled out as the main component of the dark matter, leaving WIMPs to dominate the Galaxy. Nevertheless, there seems to be evidence for some MACHOs in the Galactic halo, even if not enough to be interesting from a dark matter point of view.

      • > So are brown dwarfs ubiquitous, occurring in sufficient numbers to account for an appreciable amount of the ‘dark matter’ in the galaxy?

        It's a good question, along with extrasolar planetary bodies.

        > observed the stars for several years and looked for the kind of lensing events that would indicate the presence of a dark object between the star and the observer.

        Expecting planetyry or 'brown dwarf' scale objects to to affect such observations is, I think, optimistic at best. Note that the

  • Thank heavens they are dwarfs. We have too many trolls already.

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