Brown Dwarfs (including Jupiter and Saturn)

[Xuxalina Rihhia]

I think a dedicated topic or two should be written about brown dwarfs such as how they shine, why they produce huge plasma sheaths that glow, why they produce so much blue light when their blackbody temperature would indicate that next to no blue light should be emitted.
Brown dwarfs have been discussed before, but only briefly.

Also, we could use a discussion of why they are what they are as well as supplying paintings of how they look and images of their spectra in the visible wavelengths. Just my thoughts.

[Sparky]

Coldest Brown Dwarfs Blur Lines between Stars and Planets

A new study shows that while these brown dwarfs, sometimes called failed stars, are indeed the coldest known free-floating celestial bodies, they are warmer than previously thought with temperatures about 250-350 degrees Fahrenheit.

"If one of these objects were found orbiting a star, there is a good chance that it would be called a planet," says Trent Dupuy, a Hubble Fellow at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics. But because they probably formed on their own and not in a proto-planetary disk, astronomers still call these objects brown dwarfs even if they are "planetary mass."

For years, astronomers have known about a class of tiny stars they called brown dwarfs(named this because they’re unusually small and dim compared to most stars). But new research confirms that the stars are planet-sized—and also planet-like

They also discovered that, unlike normal stars, a brown dwarf’s temperature doesn’t correspond very strongly to its light. With these guys, what you see isn’t what you get.

will leave the high tech stuff for others...

[Xuxalina Rihhia]

Is this how Saturn (as a brown dwarf) or any brown dwarf would look like from the outside of its plasmasphere?

[nick c]

Two Brown Dwarf threads on the Electric Universe board:


http://www.thunderbolts.info/wp/forum/phpB ... 254#p16254
http://www.thunderbolts.info/wp/forum/phpB ... ?f=3&t=339

TPOD's:
http://www.thunderbolts.info/tpod/2008/ ... llstar.htm
http://www.thunderbolts.info/tpod/2005/ ... llstar.htm

[BronzeDragon]

This is interesting! I posted the question on a Facebook Astronomy group about why Saturn and Jupiter are not considered to be brown dwarfs. Will be interesting to see if I get any responses.

What about the other gas giants, Neptune and Uranus? They are very similar in circumference, color, composition, surface area--almost everything except for axial tilt. They both have rings and numerous moons. Should they be considered brown dwarfs, too, or just really gassy planets? There doesn't seem to be any clear delineation between the two.