NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope has made an exciting discovery, as it found the record-breaking tiny brown dwarf star, which only has three to four times the mass of Jupiter. This amazing discovery challenges our current understanding of star formation and has significant implications for the study of exoplanets and the classification of such objects. This helps us answer the question, “How small can stars get when they form?” Brown dwarfs form like stars, going through gravitational collapse, but never gain enough mass for nuclear fusion. This discovery also raises interesting questions about star formation at very small masses. The discovery was made utilizing Webb’s NIRCam and NIRSpec to identify brown dwarf candidates from a young star cluster in the Perseus star-forming region, 1000 light-years away. It is theorized to be quite difficult for such small brown dwarfs to form. The objects discovered overlap in mass with exoplanets and provide insight into the formation of such celestial bodies, with two of the brown dwarfs exhibiting spectral signatures of unidentified hydrocarbons, a molecule that has not previously been observed outside our solar system. The objects fall into the mass range of giant planets, but are considered more likely to be brown dwarfs than rogue planets ejected from planetary systems, based on the rarity of large planets and low-mass stars.
Source: scitechdaily.com
