The The James Webb Space Telescope allowing us to discover more celestial bodies than we could before, including ones that could further our knowledge of how our universe came to be. For example, a group of astronomers has been discovered “a rich population of brown dwarf candidates” outside our own galaxy for the first time. The image above was taken using the telescope’s Near Infrared Camera (NIRCam) instrument.
We already know about 3,000 brown dwarfs within the Milky Way, but Webb has made it possible to find candidates 200,000 light-years away from our planet. “Only in the right wavelength regime is it possible to detect these objects at such great distances with incredible sensitivity and spatial resolution,” said Peter Zeidler, head of the European Space Agency’s AURA/STScI group. “This has never been possible before and will remain impossible from the ground for the foreseeable future.”
Brown dwarfs are neither planets nor stars. They are free-floating objects about 13 to 75 times the mass of Jupiter and are not gravitationally bound to the star like exoplanets. Yes, they are larger than the largest gas giants, but they are also not large enough to emit large amounts of light, which is why they are sometimes called “failed stars.” According to the scientists involved in the study, their observations support the theory that brown dwarfs form like stars, they just “don’t accumulate enough mass to become full stars.” As NASA notes, scientists think it’s possible “great job“The mass of the universe is in the form of brown dwarfs. They could answer this question by seeing that they are mostly dark and cannot produce any light. the “missing mass” problem astronomers are still trying to solve.
The team found new brown dwarf candidates in a star cluster called NGC 602, located on the edge of the Small Magellanic Cloud dwarf galaxy. They explained that older Hubble observations had shown the cluster to contain very young low-mass stars, but Webb allowed them to get a closer look. Based on what they saw, the cluster exists in an environment comparable to the early universe, meaning that studying brown dwarfs could provide more clues about how stars and planets formed billions of years ago.
