Understanding what type of exoplanets and stars can be found in our near universe is crucial for better understanding where life may be present and how our universe first formed. Now though, scientists discovered that a significant amount of brown dwarfs may be in our cosmic neighborhood, though they remain hidden.
Brown dwarfs are objects that are too large to be called planets, but too small to be proper stars. They have a mass of only less than 7 percent the mass of the sun, which means they don't have enough pressure and heat in their interior in order to ignite hydrogen-to-helium fusion. In other words, they're not large enough to emit light and generate radiation, which means that, in some sense, brown dwarfs are actually failed stars.
In this latest study, researchers examined the distribution of nearby brown dwarfs from a different point of view. Surprisingly, they found that there was significant asymmetry in the spatial configuration of the brown dwarfs that strongly deviated from the known distribution of stars.
"I projected the nearby brown dwarfs onto the galactic plane and suddenly realized: half of the sky is practically empty," said Gabriel Bihain, one of the researchers involved in the new study from Germany's Leibniz Institute for Astrophysics Potsdam. "We absolutely didn't expect this, as we have been looking at an environment that should be homogeneous."
So what does this mean? There should actually be many more brown dwarfs in our cosmic neighborhood that are yet to be discovered. These brown dwarfs will likely fill the "gap" seen by the researchers. This means that star formation actually fails far more often than previously thought and produces about one brown dwarf for every four stars.
In fact, researchers believe that it's possible that the brown dwarfs may be hiding in data that's already been collected. Since these objects are far smaller than stars, it's possible that they've simply remained unnoticed before now. And this also means that there may be even smaller objects that have gone unnoticed, such as objects with planetary-like masses.
The findings may give researchers a whole new view of the universe, which could tell them a bit more about how planets, stars and brown dwarfs form.
The findings were published in the journal Astronomy & Astrophysics' April issue.
