“People argue about that in conferences all the time,” said Beth Biller, an astronomer at the University of Edinburgh in the U.K., particularly the lower limit.
These objects range in mass from an estimated 13 times the mass of Jupiter to 75 times or more, but exactly where those two boundaries lie is an ongoing dilemma. The discovery of the Accident highlighted how we still have much to learn about brown dwarfs.
“However, it never gains enough mass to fuse hydrogen into helium and start burning anything.” “It forms like a star,” said Sarah Casewell, an astronomer at the University of Leicester in the U.K. It was given the name WISE 1534-1043, but by virtue of its singular characteristics and chance discovery, it soon earned the nickname “ The Accident.”Īstronomers now think Caselden found a brown dwarf - a failed star that lacks the necessary bulk to begin nuclear fusion in its core. Once they ruled out the possibility that it was an image artifact, they realized they were looking at something wholly unusual, an exceedingly faint object 50 light-years away blazing through the galaxy at 200 kilometers per second. It was faint and fast, which made it very weird.”Ĭaselden emailed the astronomers he was working with as part of the Backyard Worlds: Planet 9 project. “It was moving faster than anything I’ve discovered. Suddenly, in the early hours of the morning, something bizarre popped into view. Every time he died, he would jump on his laptop to check in on an automated search he was running of NASA space telescope images. Dan Caselden was up late on November 3, 2018, playing the video game Counter-Strike, when he made astronomy history.
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