Celestia Forums

I recently read about a pair of brown dwarfs found in space.com.(http://www.space.com/astronotes/astronotes.html).
One which has 25 Jupiter masses and the other with 50 Jupiter masses.Is it a possible addition to extrasolar.ssc or not?Since they are not orbiting a normal star,it?s difficult to say if it go to stars.dat or extrasolar.ssc.

The article rather helpfully doesn't tell us where those BDs are located... anyone got any more info on that? It sounds rather intriguing.

The official press release is at http://cfa-www.harvard.edu/press/pr0424.html

and the discovery preprint is at http://cfa-www.harvard.edu/~kluhman/paper.pdf

They're members of the Chamaeleon I star forming region.

http://cfa-www.harvard.edu/~kluhman/paper.pdf.

Can't quickly spot a distance.

Spiff.

160 +/- 15 parsecs

Ref: Whittet etal. 1997, A&A, 327, 1194
briefly, see:
http://aa.springer.de/papers/7327003/2301194/small.htm

I dunno... why couldn't this pair of dwarfs have formed separately and been captured into their distant orbit around eachother during a later encounter?

Evil Dr Ganymede wrote:I dunno... why couldn't this pair of dwarfs have formed separately and been captured into their distant orbit around eachother during a later encounter?

Is there any information on their orbital eccentricity? I would think that the higher the eccentricity, the more likely that one became bound to the other much later.

Of course, this might be a poor determination.....

...John...