The Chaotic Birth of Brown Dwarfs Revealed

New observations provide insights into whether the birth of the giant planets takes a similar course to that of stars.

The birth of stars is a chaotic and dynamic process, especially in the early phase, which is characterized by complex gas structures in the form of spirals and streamers. Such structures are termed “feeding filaments” because they feed the gaseous material from the surroundings to the newly born star, akin to cosmic umbilical cords.

Cosmic Umbilical Cord
Brown dwarfs are celestial objects with masses less than one-tenth of the mass of the Sun. This makes them too small to undergo nuclear fusion and shine like stars. Before now, scientists did not know whether brown dwarfs form like sun-like stars or not. A test of this hypothesis requires high-sensitivity and high-angular resolution observations of brown dwarfs during their earliest formation stages. An international team led by LMU astrophysicist Dr. Basmah Riaz from the University Observatory Munich has now accomplished just that: The researchers conducted observations of the extremely young brown dwarf, Ser-emb 16, using the highly sophisticated ALMA observatory in Chile and recently published their results in the journal Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.