Brown dwarfs hiding in plain sight in our solar neighborhood

Cool brown dwarfs are a hot topic in astronomy right now. Smaller than stars and bigger than giant planets, they hold promise for helping us understand both stellar evolution and planet formation. New work from a team including Carnegie's Jonathan Gagné has discovered several ultracool brown dwarfs in our own solar neighborhood. Their findings are published in The Astrophysical Journal.

Brown dwarfs are sometimes called failed stars. They are too small to sustain the hydrogen fusion process that powers stars, so after forming they slowly cool, contract, and dim over time. Their temperatures can range from nearly as hot as a star to as cool as a planet and their masses also range between star-like and giant-planet-like.

They're fascinating to astronomers for a variety of reasons, mostly because they can serve as a bridge between stars and planets and how the former influences the latter, particular when it comes to composition and atmospheric properties. But much about them remains unknown.

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