Winds and jet streams found on the closest brown dwarf

A University of Arizona-led research team has found bands and stripes on the brown dwarf closest to Earth, hinting at the processes churning the brown dwarf's atmosphere from within.

Brown dwarfs are mysterious celestial objects that are not quite stars and not quite planets. They are about the size of Jupiter but typically dozens of times more massive.

Still, they are less massive than the smallest stars, so their cores do not have enough pressure to fuse atoms the way stars do. They are hot when they form and gradually cool, glowing faintly and dimming slowly throughout their lives, making them hard to find.

No telescope can clearly see the atmospheres of these objects.

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Credit: Daniel Apai

Using high-precision brightness measurements from NASA's TESS space telescope, astronomers found that the nearby brown dwarf Luhman 16B's atmosphere is dominated by high-speed, global winds akin to Earth's jet stream system.

This global circulation determines how clouds are distributed in the brown dwarf's atmosphere, giving it a striped appearance.

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Astronomers led by the University of Arizona used NASA's TESS space telescope to explore atmospheric circulation and the distribution of clouds in the closest brown dwarfs, the Luhman 16AB system.

They found that brown dwarfs appear strikingly similar to Jupiter, with large bands around the equator and smaller storms near the poles.