4 September 2025
An international team of astronomers recently found not one, but two of the strangest and rarest of all cosmic objects, and in the same star system no less.
Called brown dwarfs, these peculiar objects are invaluable resources for learning about the formation of stars, planets, and systems.
These would-be stars fail to accumulate enough mass and heat to perform continuous nuclear fusion of hydrogen molecules, and so slowly cool and harden as the years go by until they look and feel more like a planet than a star.
Being thusly cold but also small, they’re really hard to find with even a sophisticated telescope, so imagine the astronomers’ surprise when they found not one, but two—orbiting not one, but two stars.
Called a “double-double” by one member of the team, representing universities and institutes from the US, China, UK, and Spain, the cosmic quartet will provide a “unique cosmic laboratory for studying these mysterious objects.”
The system’s designation is a mouthful: UPM J1040−3551 AabBab. It’s located 1,656 astronomical units away from Earth, and the brown dwarves are estimated to be between 9 and 28-times the mass of Jupiter They’re both orbiting a much more familiar kind of dwarf: red dwarf stars.
One of the most common star types in the universe and also the smallest, the red dwarves are between 300 million and 2 billion years old, Smithsonian wrote, reporting on the discovery. This makes them relatively young, and therefore more interesting to study as the secrets of their origin are more likely to be detectable.
Though the astronomers didn’t present a hypothesis as to why there are two half-star, half-planets in the system, one might guess it’s because there wasn’t enough material for them to fully form—it was being devoured to create the two red dwarves; each of which formed into the smallest star type because material was being absorbed to form the brown dwarves.
In short, there were too many pieces of too small a pie.
Source: goodnewsnetwork
