Failed Star Shakes Up a Phosphine Cocktail
Brown dwarfs are objects that sit between planets and stars: they are more massive than planets but not heavy enough to sustain stable fusion in their cores.
The Hunt for Moons of Rogue Planets
In the vast darkness of interstellar space, the rogue planet WISE 0855 flickers with a barely perceptible heat glow, like a cooling ember. Its temperature is only a few dozen degrees above freezing — if life existed there, it would see a sunless sky, in an eternal icy haze.
Thousands of Dim Stars Found by the Crowd
There are faint points in the sky that slowly crawl among the stars. They are cooler than embers in a fireplace and smaller than the Sun: these are brown dwarfs. There are so many of them that astronomers can't keep up with reviewing all the images. That's when volunteers stepped in: ordinary people examined pictures from the telescope and flagged moving objects.