10/18/2023 0 Comments Age of wonders 3 dwarf classMethane is not seen in ordinary stars, but it is present in Jupiter and other giant gaseous planets in our solar system. Kulkarni added, however, that "it looks like Jupiter, but that's what you'd expect for a brown dwarf." The infrared spectroscopic observations of GL229B, made with the 200-inch Hale telescope at Palomar, show that the dwarf has the spectral fingerprint of the planet Jupiter - an abundance of methane. "This is the first time we have ever observed an object beyond our solar system which possesses a spectrum that is astonishingly just like that of a gas giant planet," said Shrinivas Kulkarni, a member of the team from Caltech. At least 100,000 times dimmer than Earth's Sun, the brown dwarf is the faintest object ever seen orbiting another star. Estimated to be 20 to 50 times the mass of Jupiter, GL229B is too massive and hot to be classified as a planet as we know it, but too small and cool to shine like a star. The brown dwarf, called Gliese 229B (GL229B), is a small companion to the cool red star Gliese 229, located 19 light-years from Earth in the constellation Lepus. ![]() The collaborative effort involved astronomers at the California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, CA, and the Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, MD. Palomar and a confirmatory image from NASA's Hubble Space Telescope. ![]() Palomar, a spectrum from the 200-inch Hale telescope on Mt. The evidence consists of an image from the 60-inch observatory on Mt. ![]() Four Successful Women Behind the Hubble Space Telescope's AchievementsĪstronomers have made the first unambiguous detection and image of an elusive type of object known as a brown dwarf.Characterizing Planets Around Other Stars.Measuring the Universe's Expansion Rate.
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