Planet or failed star? Hubble finds strange object

spaceflightnow.com ^ | 09/07/06

[KevinDavis]

Astronomers using NASA's Hubble Space Telescope have photographed one of the smallest objects ever seen around a normal star beyond our Sun. Weighing in at 12 times the mass of Jupiter, the object is small enough to be a planet. The conundrum is that it's also large enough to be a brown dwarf, a failed star.

[KevinDavis]

[freedumb2003]

stronomers using NASA's Hubble Space Telescope have photographed one of the smallest objects ever seen

The brain of a Democrat?

[pbear8]

Astronomers using NASA's Hubble Space Telescope have photographed one of the smallest objects ever seen

The audience for next year's Oscar's when Ellen DeGeneres hosts?

[mikrofon]

it's also large enough to be a brown dwarf, a failed star

Shown here gravitationally bound to its companion star...

[Calvin Locke]

Last I heard, a brown dwarf was 13-80X the mass of Jupiter.

So, fresh from their victory over the now re-defined dwarf planet Pluto, they now want to create
a new class, Dwarf Brown Dwarf?

[Centurion2000]

Maybe they can name it ... whachutokkkinboutWillis!

[SunkenCiv]

great minds...

http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-chat/1677175/posts?page=12#12

[SunkenCiv]

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[norton]

I'm sure it is quite important to someone, astronomers or astrologists or semanticists.

Personally, I subscribe to the "if it walks like a duck" school:

It circles a sun,
It has an established orbit around that sun,
It's bigger than a bread basket,
It isn't giving off huge amounts of solar radiation...

Sounds like a planet to me.

[Jedi Master Pikachu]

Wouldn't a brown dwarf be a gas giant? As long as it doesn't have fusion from its mass, wouldn't it still be a planet?

[BenLurkin]

Failed star.

Might be mistaken for a planet.

ROSIE O'DONNEL

[SunkenCiv]

Additional 'fo in New Scientist:

Alien planet poised to reveal all its secrets
by David Shiga
8 September 2006

Luhman argues that any future definition of the term that includes extrasolar planets should stipulate that the objects form from a disc of gas and dust around their host star – and not from a collapsing gas cloud.

This find would be excluded from planetary status if such a definition were adopted, a situation that Luhman says is interesting in itself. "It's a neat idea that you have a planetary-mass companion that may not really be a planet," he says.

[SunkenCiv]

http://live.psu.edu/story/19388