Whatever the dwarfs lacked in star quality, they made up for in elusiveness, escaping astronomers’ gaze for three decades. Last week, though, teams from the California Institute of Technology, Johns Hopkins University and the Hubble Space Telescope announced that they had finally made two photographs and recorded the spectrum of one of these celestial underachievers, proving that brown dwarfs exist. It’s called Gliese 229B, it’s 19 light-years away and “it looks like Jupiter,” says Caltech’s Shrinivas Kulkarni. “But that’s what you’d expect.”
Wouldn’t you, though. Smaller than the sun but 9.0 to 50 times the size of Jupiter, GL229B should help astronomers understand just what it takes to make a star. In the heavens as on Earth, it appears to be gas-lots and lots of hot gas.
