Astronomers catch a star slowly snacking on a brown dwarf, 300 light years away
https://news.mit.edu/2026/astronomers-catch-star-slowly-snacking-on-brown-dwarf-1005Open linkView original on lemmy.zipSyndicated from the fediverse. Read and engage on the original instance.
View original on lemmy.ziphttps://news.mit.edu/2026/astronomers-catch-star-slowly-snacking-on-brown-dwarf-1005Open linkView original on lemmy.zip
6 replies
"The rate at which the star is feeding from the brown dwarf suggests that this slow stellar cannibalism could carry on for hundreds of thousands, or even billions of years."
I wonder why they called it cannibalism
Stars eating stars
is a brown dwarf already a star?
A brown dwarf is an astronomical object that is larger than a planet but not massive enough to sustain hydrogen fusion like a star, typically having a mass between 13 and 80 times that of Jupiter. They are often referred to as "failed stars" because they can fuse deuterium but cannot maintain stable hydrogen fusion.
Very interesting read on wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brown_dwarf
That's uhhh... quite the margin of error there. Hundreds of thousands... or billions.
"I have $1 ... or $900,000
Ok, well at least they put the comma in the right place. But I definitely read that wrong the first time anyway.
"But how could it feed from a brown dwarf that far away?
...
Oh, I see."