Is brown dwarf new type of extreme whopper?
Have a team of astronomers found a new class of Jupiter-like planet with a gargantuan core of 100 Earth-masses? This is what the joint UK-Chilean-Polish team are asking themselves after first results were obtained from CHEPS (the Calan-Hertfordshire Exoplanet Search). The object in question orbits the Sun-like star HD191760, 290 light years away. What’s more, the object, dubbed HD191760b, is in a region around the star commonly referred to as the ‘brown dwarf desert.’ The study was a joint collaboration between Hertfordshire University, Nicolaus Copernicus University, and the Universidad de Chile. The brown dwarf HD191760b could be a new type of ‘extreme-jovian’ body. Image: NASA/JPL-Caltech/T.Pyle (SSC). These are areas where very few (less than one percent) of brown dwarfs are located. For a Sun-like star this can be anything up to five times the Earth-Sun distance away from that star (though it can vary with each individual star). Brown dwarfs are bodies tens of times as massive as
