Discovered just 11 years ago, a class of oddball "failed stars" continues to baffle as well as enlighten astronomers. Now researchers have spotted for the first time one of these failed stars, called a brown dwarf, with a companion planet — both orbiting a Sun-like star.

"This is the first brown dwarf that has been directly imaged in an extrasolar planetary system," lead researcher Kevin Luhman of Penn State University told SPACE.com.

The finding, detailed in the current issue of The Astrophysical Journal, sheds light on these mysterious objects that blur the lines between a planet and a star.

 Brown dwarfs are too small to trigger the fusion of hydrogen that keeps stars like our sun shining for billions of years. Instead, with masses up to 75 times that of Jupiter, brown dwarfs slowly cool and fizzle out over tens of millions of years.

Located within the constellation Pisces, the newly spotted object is called HD 3651 B. It is 50 times the mass of Jupiter and thus considered a T brown dwarf — the coolest of the two brown-dwarf categories. 

 

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