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Title: Birth Of An Unsual Planetary System View count: 51 Rating: 5.0 (1 ratings) Description: This artist's animation shows a brown dwarf surrounded by a swirling disk of planet-building dust. NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope spotted such a disc around a surprisingly low-mass brown dwarf, or "failed star." The brown dwarf, called OTS 44, is only 15 times the size of Jupiter, making it the smallest brown dwarf known to host a planet-forming, or protoplanetary disk. Astronomers believe that this unusual system will eventually spawn planets. If so, they speculate that OTS 44's disk has enough mass to make one small gas giant and a few Earth-sized rocky planets. OTS 44 is about 2 million years old. At this relatively young age, brown dwarfs are warm and appear reddish in color. With age, they grow cooler and darker. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/T. Pyle (SSC) Tags: exoplanet, circumstellar disk, brown dwarf, spitzer space telescope, infrared astronomy, Author: djxatlanta |
