Gemini North observations help identify rotational speed limit for brown dwarfs
Three brown dwarfs, often called failed stars, are spinning faster than any others.
April 19, 2021
Astronomers have discovered the most rapidly rotating brown dwarfs three brown dwarfs that each complete a full rotation roughly once every hour. The rate is so extreme that if they rotated any faster, they could come close to tearing apart.
Brown dwarfs are, simply put, failed stars. They form like stars but are less massive and more like giant planets.
Astronomers first measured the rotation speeds of these brown dwarfs using the Spitzer Space Telescope and confirmed them with follow-up observations with the Gemini North telescope on Maunakea in Hawaii and the Magellan Baade telescope in Chile. Gemini North is one of the pair of telescopes that make up the international Gemini Observatory, a program of NSF s NOIRLab.
Caught speeding: Clocking the fastest-spinning brown dwarfs nsf.gov - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from nsf.gov Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
Advanced optics capture structures as small as 20 kilometers on the surface of the sun
The sunspot image taken by NSF s Inouye Solar Telescope s Wave Front Correction context viewer.
December 9, 2020
The world s largest solar observatory, the U.S. National Science Foundation s Daniel K. Inouye Solar Telescope, has released its first image of a sunspot. Although the telescope is still in the final phases of completion, the image is an indication of how the telescope s advanced optics and 4-meter primary mirror will give scientists the best view of the sun from Earth throughout the next solar cycle.
The sunspot image accompanies a new paper by Thomas Rimmele and his team. Rimmele is the associate director at NSF s National Solar Observatory, the organization responsible for building and operating the Inouye Solar Telescope. The sunspot was captured by the Inouye Solar Telescope on January 28, 2020 and is not the same sunspot currently visible to the naked eye.