The importance of investigations by the most powerful space telescope built by man, the James Webbit’s not like he can literally investigate every corner in unprecedented detail Universe no matter how far away and how well hidden it is, but it can do various types of data collection and analysis on the space bodies it targets. James Webb’s latest achievement is studying the weather conditions in a brown dwarf binary system.
Brown dwarfs are a special class of cosmic bodies, as they are neither planets nor stars. They are characterized as “failed stars” because all the evidence available to scientists indicates that they began as stars, but at some point this process was interrupted, resulting in what is essentially a cosmic remnant that continues to maintain a minimal level of function.
Brown dwarfs are celestial bodies larger than Jupiter, but with less mass than that needed to become stars. Although there are about 100 billion brown dwarfs in our galaxy, less than two thousand have been identified to date because their radiation is very weak and they are relatively small in size. They have relatively high temperatures when they are born (tens of thousands to millions of degrees Celsius). As they gradually cool, their temperature drops to about a thousand degrees Celsius.
A research team has used James Webb to conduct detailed examinations of the atmospheric conditions of a pair of brown dwarfs orbiting each other. The two brown dwarfs, codenamed WISE 1049AB, are located about six light-years from Earth, making them two cosmic bodies so close together that they were able to be collected by the powerful space telescope.
The maps
These observations led to the revelation of the climatic conditions prevailing on the two brown dwarfs. With Publication In the journal Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, the research team incredibly reports that the two brown dwarfs maintain an extremely hot toxic chemical cocktail that swirls through their atmospheres, forming multiple layers of clouds found at different atmospheric depths. Among them are clouds of silica particles that move like dust storms in the Sahara Desert.
Both have atmospheres dominated by hydrogen and helium, with traces of water vapor, methane and carbon monoxide. The temperature at the cloud tops was about 925 degrees Celsius.
“We have created the most detailed ‘weather maps’ of brown dwarfs to date,” says Beth Biller, an astronomer at the University of Edinburgh’s Institute of Astronomy, who led the research team. The findings offer new clues to the enigma of brown dwarfs’ existence.
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