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oups nouveau :/


merci

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/3644410.stm

Waitaminute... this could be a giant planet orbiting a Brown Dwarf?!

That confuses things... I thought BDs would only be able to have terrestrial bodies orbiting them (like the Galiean satellites, but rockier). Still, this is very interesting!

Well, there are brown dwarfs known to be orbiting one another, so it seems to me that there must be the full range of orbiting body sizes. Of course, some combinations may be rarer than others.

According to the PDF file

http://www.sc.eso.org/%7Egchauvin/Gg222.pdf

...it appears at first sight a brown dwarf orbiting an object of spectral type M8. The object is quite young though and the paper says that young bright dwarves are brighter than the magnitude they eventually evolve into. All quite fascinating to an amateur like me...

I don't unterstand that picture.
Is the gas giant glowing? If he's just lit by his sun, he should be standing almost opposite to our viewpoint. Why then the measure line.

maxim

Maxim,

They've used adaptive optics to produce spectrograms and images of two very faint objects. It's not reflected light, both objects are glowing faintly in infra-red wavelengths.

The resolution isn't good enough to show phases at that distance, just faint sources of near-infrared radiation. The picture is a "false color" combination of images in three different infra-red wavelengths.

See http://www.eso.org/outreach/press-rel/pr-2004/pr-23-04.html
for more details.

For non-french speakers, this topic :
http://www.interstars.net/index.php?actu=441
can be translated via any internet translator.
'Hope it does !

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