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The James Webb Space Telescope has reliably detected phosphine for the first time in the atmosphere of a cool brown dwarf — and it turned out to be ten times more than predicted.
Brown dwarfs — 'failed stars' that couldn't ignite their nuclear furnace. More massive than planets but lighter than stars, they resemble giant atmospheric mixers: their interiors are hot, their upper layers relatively cool, and powerful currents shake this mixture. Using spectroscopy (breaking light into colors) on JWST, scientists detected phosphine in Wolf 1130C. This gas, known from Jupiter, turned out to be ten times more concentrated here than previously seen.
The abundance of phosphine indicates strong convection: from the scorching depths, gas shoots upward at hundreds of meters per second — faster than any Earthly hurricane.
Curiously, on Earth this gas smells like decay, while the cosmic 'cocktail' mixes odorlessly. Now astronomers can use such chemical markers to more clearly distinguish exoplanet from brown dwarfs.
