Forget hurricane Irene that hammered the U.S. East Coast last month. You can even forget the monster storm whirling endlessly on Jupiter, creating the famous Great Red Spot. If celestial objects could compare storm violence, a nearby brown dwarf would win easily -- and its effects can be detected 47 light-years away.
The brown dwarf in question, called "2MASS J21392676+0220226" (a.k.a. "2MASS 2139"), was studied by a University of Toronto team of astronomers using an infrared camera attached to the 2.5 meter telescope at Las Campanas Observatory in Chile. They discovered something rather perplexing about this "failed star."
Over a short observational period of a few hours, the researchers noticed 2MASS 2139 change in brightness significantly. Naturally, that piqued their interest.
"We found that our target's brightness changed by a whopping 30 percent in just under eight hours," said postgraduate Jacqueline Radigan, lead author of the publication that has been submitted to the Astrophysical Journal. The work of Radigan's team will also be presented at the Extreme Solar Systems II conference in Jackson Hole, Wyoming this week.
So what could be causing these brightness variations? After all, a brown dwarf doesn't have surface features like bright ice caps and dark lava flows that one would expect on the solid surface of a rocky planet.
Read More: http://news.discovery.com/space/violent-storms-rage-on-nearby-brown-dwarf-110913.html
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