Astronomers believe they've spotted the tiniest stars: brown dwarfs only a few times the size of Jupiter, lurking dimly in the darkest depths of space. Yes, Jupiter is a standard unit of mass!
"For the first time, you can actually look for objects down to at least a couple of Jupiter masses," says Ray Jayawardhana, an astrophysicist at Johns Hopkins University and member of one team. What they're seeing matches the lower mass limit predicted by theories of star formation, adding to astronomers' confidence that they might finally be seeing the smallest brown dwarfs that nature can build. However, one controversial unpublished study from a fourth team claims the detection of paired brown dwarfs that are nearly as small as Jupiter, an unexpected finding that would upend star formation models. "If one of those turns out to be a true Jupiter-mass binary, it would be really great," says Alexander Scholz of the University of St. Andrews. But Koraljka Mužic of the Institute of Astrophysics and Space Sciences in Lisbon, Portugal, thinks that's unlikely. "I'm very skeptical about that finding," she says.
Thank the James Webb Space Telescope; the paper is titled A JWST Survey for Planetary Mass Brown Dwarfs in IC 348.
We have obtained images of the center of the star-forming cluster IC 348 with the James Webb Space Telescope and have identified brown dwarf candidates based on their photometry and point-like flux profiles. Low-resolution spectroscopy has been performed on four promising candidates, three of which have molecular absorption bands that indicate late spectral types. Among those late-type objects, the brightest is similar to known young L dwarfs while the other two show the so-called 3.4 μm feature that has been previously observed in the diffuse interstellar medium and in the atmospheres of Saturn and Titan, which has been attributed to an unidentified aliphatic hydrocarbon. Those two objects also exhibit features between 1.1 and 2.6 μm that we identify as the overtone and combination bands for that hydrocarbon. After accounting for the hydrocarbon bands, the remaining spectral features are consistent with youth and inconsistent with field dwarfs. Based on the low extinctions of those objects and the strengths of the overtone and combination bands, we conclude that the hydrocarbon resides in their atmospheres rather than in foreground material. Thus, our detections of the 3.4 μm feature are the first in atmospheres outside of the solar system. The presence of this hydrocarbon is not predicted by any atmospheric models of young brown dwarfs. Based on its luminosity and evolutionary models, the faintest new member of IC 348 has an estimated mass of 3–4 MJup, making it a strong contender for the least massive free-floating brown dwarf that has been directly imaged to date.
It doesn't sound like much, but it sounds like a vacation to me.
