Rare Quadruple Star System May Solve the Mystery of Brown Dwarfs
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Rare quadruple star system may solve the mystery of brown dwarfs:
Space just dealt astronomers a curveball - one that's 82 light-years from home, potentially capable of answering fundamental questions about some of the strangest objects in our galaxy: brown dwarfs.
Brown dwarfs are neither stars nor planets. They're caught in between. Too small to fuel the nuclear fusion that powers true stars, but too massive to be planets, they've always been difficult to define.
Now, a strange new quadruple system might give researchers exactly what they've needed to make sense of these in-between objects.
Two stars, two dwarfs, one orbit
Astronomers have discovered a system with not just one, but four objects locked together in space. Two red dwarf stars orbit each other on one side.
On the opposite, two brown dwarfs are in another close pair. And these two pairs, in concert, orbit a common center of mass - like an intergalactic waltz taking more than 100,000 years to complete a full rotation.
This unusual system is called UPM J1040-3551 AabBab. It's located in the constellation Antlia, about 82 light-years away from us. That might sound far, but on a cosmic scale, it's relatively close.
The researchers who found the system used data from the European Space Agency's Gaia satellite and NASA's WISE mission. These tools helped them spot the signs of two separate objects moving in sync through space.
Because the orbit is so slow, scientists couldn't see it directly. Instead, they matched angular velocity - basically, the speed and direction of the objects' motion.
The system breaks down into two main parts. The brighter pair, UPM J1040-3551 Aab, consists of two red dwarfs. These are small, cool stars that appear orange in visible light.
You'd never spot them with your naked eye - not even the closest red dwarf, Proxima Centauri, is visible without a telescope. This pair is about 100,000 times dimmer than Polaris, the North Star.
Then there's the dimmer pair, UPM J1040-3551 Bab. They are brown dwarfs, and they produce hardly any visible light. They're only visible in the near-infrared part of the spectrum and are about 1,000 times fainter than their red dwarf stars. That makes them extremely difficult to observe.
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