Thanks to a quirk of astrophysics, astronomers were able to observe features just tens of kilometers apart near a spinning neutron star located 6,500 light-years away from Earth. This is like using a telescope in your backyard to see DNA strands on the moon.
Are they stars? Are they lost planets? Brown dwarfs, the galaxy’s dark, wandering orbs, are some of space’s most perplexing features. They’re larger than Jupiter but smaller than stars, glow on their own and, well, they’re just really strange. A new analysis seems to explain at least a few of…
The scene seems like a storm over a sea of lava somewhere in Mordor, but you are looking at the surface of a failed star — the weather on a brown dwarf based on new data from the Spitzer Space Telescope. It’s spectacular. Even more so when you think that’s…