Astronomers have found a brown dwarf object which is too large to be a planet but too small to be a star. It has the purest composition and the highest mass yet known. This brown dwarf is also called SDSS J010448.46+153501.8 (J0104 for short). It is a member the so-called halo which is the outer reaches of our galaxy formed of almost ancient starts.
As written in Oneindia, researchers said that brown dwarf located 750 light years away in the constellation of Pisces and is formed of gasses that are around 250 times purer than Sun and consists of more that 99.99 percent helium and hydrogen. An estimate has been made that this brown dwarf was formed about 10 billion years ago.
Measurements also suggest that it almost has a mass equivalent to 90 times that of Jupiter, making it one of the massive brown dwarfs till date. "It is something really unexpected to see brown dwarfs that are this pure," astronomer Dr. Zeng Hua Zhang, University of La Laguna and the Institute of Astrophysics in the Canary Islands said.
According to Sci-news, a brown dwarf is an intermediate between fully fledged stars and planets. Researchers say that they are significantly more massive than planets as their mass is too small for full nuclear fusion of hydrogen to helium to take place. This finding was published in the journal Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.
Brown Dwarf as also known as failed stars almost about the size of Jupiter with a much larger mass but not large enough to become a star. Like Jupiter and Sun, they are also mainly composed of hydrogen gas, with swirling cloud belts. Unlike Sun, they have no source of internal energy and emit almost no visible light. They are formed along with other stars by the contraction of gasses and dust in the interstellar medium. The first Brown Draft was not discovered until 1995.
