When you buy through links on our articles, Future and its syndication partners may earn a commission.An illustration shows two brown dwarfs in the process of merging. | Credit: Caltech/R. Hurt (IPAC)Brown dwarfs may have gained the unfortunate nickname “failed stars,” but new research suggests they can collide and merge for a second chance at success.Brown dwarfs are cosmic objects with around 13 to 80 times the mass of Jupiter, making them around 0.013 to 0.08 times as massive as the sun. They are deemed as having “failed” because despite forming like normal stars — when vast, overly dense patches of matter collapse in interstellar clouds of gas and dust — they fail to gather enough mass from these clouds to trigger the nuclear fusion of hydrogen to helium in their cores, the process that defines a “main sequence” star, like the sun.AdvertisementAdvertisementHowever, after searching through observations collected by the Zwicky Transient Facility (ZTF) at Palomar Observatory, a team of scientists has discovered a tightly orbiting pair of brown dwarfs that are working together to combat this “failure.” One brown dwarf is actively siphoning material from its companion, meaning it could achieve the mass needed to trigger nuclear fusion in its core and become a fully-fledged star. Either that, or these brown dwarfs will collide and merge, birthing an entirely new star with enough mass to trigger nuclear fusion.”The failed stars get a second chance,” team leader Samuel Whitebook, from California Institute of Technology (Caltech), said in a statement. “Brown dwarfs don’t have internal engines like stars do, but this result shows they can exhibit very interesting dynamic physics.”The team’s findings are extraordinary because, though similar mass transfer has been seen in binary objects before, this has occurred between stellar bodies with far greater masses.”These are very exotic objects,” team member Tom Prince of Caltech said. “We’ve told some of our colleagues about them, and they didn’t believe such a thing exists.”[embedded content]The brown dwarf pairing at the heart of this discovery, found in the ZTF Variability Archive, is designated ZTF J1239+8347 (ZTF J1239) and is located around 1,000 light-years away in the constellation Ursa Major. The two brown dwarfs, both 60 to 80 times as massive as Jupiter, orbit each other so tightly that the entire ZTF J1239 system would fit between Earth and the moon.AdvertisementAdvertisementThe researchers can’t be sure how these brown dwarfs initially came to orbit each other, but they suspect that the failed stars were pulled from separate systems and pushed together by the gravitational influence of another star. Once orbiting each other, the brown dwarfs would have gradually spiraled closer an …
