Image: NOIRLab/NSF/AURA/J. da Silva
New research documents the fastest-spinning brown dwarfs on record. The objects are rotating so rapidly that, should they rotate any faster, they’d likely tear themselves apart. The finding could mean that these so-called “failed stars” have a built-in speed limit.
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The three brown dwarfs are spinning 10 times faster than Jupiter, completing a single rotation around their axes once every hour. That’s about 30% faster than the fastest spinning brown dwarfs on record, according to the new paper, which is set to appear in an upcoming issue of the Astronomical Journal (a preprint is currently available at the arXiv).
VIDEO: CosmoView Episode 25: Caught Speeding: Clocking the Fastest-Spinning Brown Dwarfs view more
Credit: Images and Videos: International Gemini Observatory/NOIRLab/NSF/AURA/J. da Silva, P. Marenfeld, NASA/JPL-Caltech, R. Hurt (IPAC).
Music: zero-project - The Lower Dungeons (zero-project.gr).
Astronomers at Western University have discovered the most rapidly rotating brown dwarfs known. They found three brown dwarfs that each complete a full rotation roughly once every hour. That rate is so extreme that if these failed stars rotated any faster, they could come close to tearing themselves apart. Identified by NASA s Spitzer Space Telescope, the brown dwarfs were then studied by ground-based telescopes including Gemini North, which confirmed their surprisingly speedy rotation.