Planets Around Brown Dwarfs
The planetary-mass objects 2M1207b, GQ Lupi b and 2MASS J044144 that are orbiting brown-dwarfs may have formed by cloud collapse rather than accretion and so may be sub-brown dwarfs rather than planets.
Disks around brown dwarfs have been found to have many of the same features as disks around stars; therefore, it is expected that there will be accretion-formed planets around brown dwarfs. Given the small mass of brown dwarf disks, most planets will be terrestrial planets rather than gas giants. If a giant planet orbits a brown dwarf across our line of sight then since they have approximately the same diameter this would give a large signal for detection by transit. The accretion zone for planets around a brown dwarf is very close to the brown dwarf itself, so tidal forces would have a strong effect.
Read more about this topic: Brown Dwarf
Famous quotes containing the words planets, brown and/or dwarfs:
“Marriage is the clue to human life, but there is no marriage apart from the wheeling sun and the nodding earth, from the straying of the planets and the magnificence of the fixed stars.”
—D.H. (David Herbert)
“Blown hair is sweet, brown hair over the mouth blown,
Lilac and brown hair;”
—T.S. (Thomas Stearns)
“Some are dinning in our ears that we Americans, and moderns generally, are intellectual dwarfs compared with the ancients, or even the Elizabethan men. But what is that to the purpose? A living dog is better than a dead lion. Shall a man go and hang himself because he belongs to the race of pygmies, and not be the biggest pygmy that he can? Let every one mind his own business, and endeavor to be what he was made.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)