Surprising Truth About a Half-Star, Half-Planet Object Discovered Nearly Three Decades Ago Has Just Been Decoded.
According to Science Alert, in 1995, researchers from the California Institute of Technology (Caltech, USA) used the Palomar Observatory to search for what appeared to be a brown dwarf, a type of object that is an intermediary between stars and planets.
This object was named Gliese 229 B, orbiting a red dwarf star located just 19 light-years away from us.
However, Gliese 229 B quickly left scientists perplexed: The light signals from this object were too strange, too faint compared to what a brown dwarf 70 times the mass of Jupiter should emit.
Graphic depicting a pair of “planets from nothing” accompanying another distant star. – (Image: PENNSYLVANIA UNIVERSITY).
Brown dwarfs typically have masses ranging from 13 to 80 times that of Jupiter, which is too large for a planet yet too small to sustain nuclear fusion in their cores to become stars.
They are also formed within gas and dust clouds similar to stars, rather than from the protoplanetary disk of another parent star.
Thus, they are sometimes referred to as “failed stars,” “rogue planets,” or “planets from nothing.” Overall, they remain a significant mystery in astronomy.
The existence of Gliese 229 B further puzzled scientists as they tried to understand the nature of this type of object. However, after nearly three decades, researchers have now found a “new light.”
This time, the research team from Caltech collaborated with several leading research institutions worldwide, including the American and European space agencies (NASA and ESA), the European Southern Observatory (ESO), and the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy (MPIA, Germany).
They utilized the GRAVITY interferometer at the Very Large Telescope of ESO in Chile to analyze this strange object, proposing a new hypothesis: Gliese 229 B is actually a pair of objects.
Subsequently, the high-resolution infrared spectrograph CRIRES+ of this observatory continued to search for distinct spectral signatures and measure their Doppler shifts.
Results recently published in the journal Nature confirmed that Gliese 229 B consists of two brown dwarfs (Gliese 229 Ba and Gliese 229 Bb), with masses approximately 38 and 34 times that of Jupiter.
This duo orbits each other with a period of 12 days and at a distance 16 times that of the Earth-Moon distance.
These results align perfectly with the light signals that Caltech scientists collected from Gliese 229 B nearly 30 years ago.
According to the authors, the discovery of Gliese 229 B as a pair not only resolves a long-standing mystery but also promises to significantly deepen our understanding of brown dwarfs.
They are also a rare pair of brown dwarfs with a companion, the red dwarf Gliese 229 A, around which they nearly revolve.
Some hypotheses suggest that pairs of brown dwarfs may form within the protoplanetary disks of a star, where the disk fragments into two brown dwarf seeds that are bound by gravity after close encounters.
However, most researchers still believe that their relationship is merely one of companionship, as all are directly formed from the interstellar gas and dust cloud.
Scientists hope to discover more similar pairs to answer this question.
