But brown dwarfs are not planets.
And unlike stars,as EarthSky explains, brown dwarfs do not undergo normal stellar fusion.
Jackie Faherty, an astronomer at the American Museum of Natural History in New York, led the team.
An artist’s impression of a brown dwarf with an aurora.Illustration:NASA, ESA, CSA, Leah Hustak (STScI)
But one of the dwarfsW1935exhibited a methane emission.
But instead of absorbing light, we saw just the opposite: The methane was glowing.
My first thought was, what the heck?
Why is methane emission coming out of this object?
The teams models indicated that W2220, the similar brown dwarf, got cooler at higher altitudes.
But W1935 got hotter at higher altitudes, according to their model.
They hope that the Webb spectral data can help explain what causes the methane emission.
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