Out of this World! Astronomers Discover Brown Dwarf that Orbits Star
- IndiaGlitz, [Saturday,June 29 2019]
Researchers at the University of Warwick in England were examining an object named NGTS-7, what they thought was a single star. They found however that every 16.2 hours, the starlight dimmed briefly. Astronomers have discovered that there are two stars which are similarly sized, and one was dimming briefly due to a celestial body circling above its surface. The latest explanation for this is a brown dwarf which orbits the star in just 16.2 hours.
The researchers measured the dip of the light as the brown dwarf passed between the Earth and the star. The dip which represents the signal of a ‘transit,’ is large because of the size of the two. Hugh Osborn, an astronomer at the Laboratoire d'Astrophysique de Marseille in France said: “Detecting this system is probably the easy bit. Because the star is so small and the brown dwarf relatively large, the transit signal is actually about 10 times larger than that of [a typical exoplanet that turns up in surveys of the night sky].”
What poses a challenge however is making sense of the transit signal of a brown dwarf. This particular one is also very close to its host star. This could be due to the gravitational pull of the other star in the system. The two bodies are in perfect synchronization as of now. Over time, the orbit of the brown dwarf is expected to shrink and then collapse on the host itself resulting in a spectacular visual display.