Astronomers Discover Local Star's Cool Companion

[A.DIM]

From ScienceDaily:

"What's so exciting in this case, is that we can use what we know about the primary star to find out about the properties of the brown dwarf, and that makes it an extremely useful find", explains Dr Burningham, "you can think of it as a Rosetta Stone for decrypting what the light from such cool objects is telling us".

"Red dwarfs are the most populous stars in the Galaxy, and systems like this may be more common than we know" says Dr David Pinfield of the University of Hertfordshire, "As the generation of ongoing large scale surveys continues, we may discover a pack of Wolf-940B-like objects in our solar back yard."

Considering how most systems are binary or better, "more common than we know" suggests single stars systems could be rather unique.

Exciting!

[GOURDHEAD]

Does anyone know what stellar formation theories have predicted (or can predict) about the mass distribution within the galactic stellar populations? Does the increase in metallicity over time favor the formation of ever more m dwarfs? Some years ago I read that the presence of water in the proto-stellar cloud steers the thermodynamics of proto-stellar clouds in favor of star formation.

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"What's so exciting in this case, is that we can use what we know about the primary star to find out about the properties of the brown dwarf, and that makes it an extremely useful find", explains Dr Burningham, "you can think of it as a Rosetta Stone for decrypting what the light from such cool objects is telling us".

It took me a couple of takes to figure out what he was talking about in that little quote:

He means that the brown dwarf probably has the same chemical composition and age as the red dwarf it's orbiting, because the two probably formed out of the same interstellar cloud at the same time.