YET another planetary system in the making has been discovered - but this one is a bit different from the many other extrasolar systems discovered so far. Instead of surrounding a sun-like star, it is centred on a brown dwarf that is itself barely bigger than a giant planet. And despite the host star lacking the nuclear reactions that make our sun shine, its disc could one day spawn habitable Earth-sized planets.
The discovery calls for a rethink of how many different kinds of planetary systems there might be. "We just think of planets forming around stars about the mass of our sun," says Kevin Luhman of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge, Massachusetts. "But they could form in more exotic situations around very small brown dwarfs. There might be little mini solar systems out there."
Brown dwarfs are failed stars with masses of between 15 and 70 times ...
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