Astronomers Map the Weather on Distant Brown Dwarf

Astronomers studying the weather on distant worlds have made the first global weather map of any object outside the solar system, mapping the movement of clouds on a cosmic body known as a brown dwarf, 6.5 light-years away. Brown dwarfs are cosmological oddities. Too big to be a planet, but too small to be a star, the gaseous bodies reach temperatures around 3,000 degrees Fahrenheit and have clouds made of minerals, rock and droplets of molten iron. Astronomers from Germany’s Max Planck Institute for Astronomy studying two brown dwarfs named Luhman 16A and 16B found complicated weather patterns on the dwarfs and made a complete map of what the weather on Luhman 16B looked like one day last May.



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