Friday, July 30, 2010

Found: Jupiter-sized Brown Dwarf, Hiding in a Tight Orbit Around a Young Sun

July 30, 2010 - Discover Magazine (blog)
... Astronomers have just found such a duo: a star about the mass of our sun with an unusually close brown dwarf companion.
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A paper to appear in Astrophysical Journal Letters details the find, which was made using images from the Near-Infrared Coronagraphic Imager, on the Gemini-South telescope in Chile. The researchers predicted the orbit by using two observations, one in April of 2009 and another in May of 2010 and then calculated the brown dwarf’s motion using a computer model.
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