After analyzing two brown dwarfs closest to the Sun, researchers found that the failed star system may be hosting another planet, according to a press statement.
Failed stars are better known as brown dwarfs. They have a mass less than 8 percent of the Sun's mass and hence, are not massive enough to burn hydrogen at their core. After studying two brown stars from the Luhman 16AB star system, researchers found the existence of another planet within the system.
Using the FORS2 instrument on ESO's Very Large Telescope, researchers of the study examined the two failed stars once every five or six days over two months. This allowed them to detect even tiny displacements of the two objects in their orbit. They found that both cosmic objects had a mass between 30 and 50 Jupiter masses.
"The two brown dwarfs are separated by about three times the distance between the Earth and the Sun. Binary brown dwarf systems are gravitationally bound and orbit about each other. Because these two dwarfs have so little mass, they take about 20 years to complete one orbit," explained Carnegie Institution's Yuri Beletsky.
The very precise measurements made by the instruments allowed researchers to observe every small deviation from the expected motion of the dwarfs around each other. There was a strong indication that a companion star was disturbing the motion of one of the two brown dwarfs. In other words, it's likely a planetary-mass object is causing the deviation.
"We have been able to measure the positions of these two objects with a precision of a few milli-arcseconds," said Henri Boffin of the European Southern Observatory. "That is like a person in Paris being able to measure the position of someone in New York with a precision of 10 centimetres. Further observations are required to confirm the existence of a planet. But it may well turn out that the closest brown dwarf binary system to the Sun turns out to be a triple system!"
The findings are published in the journal Astronomy & Astrophysics.
