Astronomers have found a pretty weird binary system about 450 light years from Earth: Neither of its components is a star. Instead, one is a brown dwarf, and the other appears to be a planet orbiting it! Even then, the brown dwarf is on the lower end of things. If it were any less massive it would be a planet itself.
The system is called CFHTWIR-Oph 98, but we ll call it Oph 98 for short. It was found a few years ago in ground-based observations using the Canada-France-Hawaii Telescope s infrared WIRCAM camera (hence the first part of the object s name) in a region of the galaxy where stars are being born which we see in the constellation of Ophiuchus (hence the second name part). It was observed in 2006 and 2012, and identified as a brown dwarf an object more massive than a planet but too lightweight to ignite sustained nuclear fusion in its core like a star.
Makes no difference who you are
Anything your heart desires
Will come to you
(“When You Wish Upon a Star” by Leigh Harline and Ned Washington for the movie “Pinocchio”)
Well, just make sure what you’re wishing upon is really a star. That’s the warning from a new study published in The Astrophysical Journal Letters which details the discovery of a binary pair of space objects that don’t fit the usual definition of stars (which, it turns out, isn’t so usual) nor planets. These wanderers don’t seem to be happy either – they’ve taken social distancing to a new level by traveling together while staying around 19 billion miles apart – five times the distance between Pluto and the Sun.
An international research team has discovered an exotic binary system composed of two young planet-like objects, orbiting each other - and not a star.
They are planet-like because they look like giant exoplanets but they formed in the same way as stars, proving that the mechanisms driving star formation can produce rogue worlds in unusual systems - deprived of a Sun.
Star-forming processes sometimes create mysterious astronomical objects called brown dwarfs, which are smaller and colder than stars, and can have masses and temperatures down to those of exoplanets in the most extreme cases. Just like stars, brown dwarfs often wander alone through space, but can also be seen in binary systems, where two brown dwarfs orbit one another and travel together in the galaxy.
Astronomers find two failed stars wandering the universe together
Astronomers have discovered an exotic binary system consisting of two brown dwarfs orbiting each other.
A team of researchers from the University of Bern has discovered a very different binary system 450 light-years from Earth. The system CFHTWIR-Oph 98 or Oph 98 for short has twin occupants that appeared at first sight to be exoplanets existing in a star-less system. A deeper examination has revealed that they are brown dwarfs Oph 98 A and Oph 98 B respectively astronomical objects that are similar to stars but smaller and cooler.
This artist’s illustration represents a couple of planetary-mass brown dwarfs Ophiuchus 98. As they are very young, they are still evolving in the molecular clouds that saw their birth. (University of Bern, Illustration: Thibaut Roger)