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The Kepler space telescope has expanded our understanding of planetary systems since it commencement launched, but it's shedding light on unique types of stars and stellar phenomena also. Researchers have now reported finding a highly unusual star, with a raging storm on its surface. The star, W1906+xl, is roughly Jupiter-sized, and packs a maelstrom over its due north pole that'due south been visible for at least 2 years.

One of the things that makes W1906+40 interesting is that it's an L-dwarf star, as well known every bit a brown dwarf. Brown dwarf stars blur the line between huge gas giants and red dwarf stars. Stars course when clouds of gas and dust plummet together. As the gas compresses, the core of the cloud heats up, while the outer layers cool. In a conventional star, the core eventually becomes dense plenty to sustain hydrogen fusion. A stable star, like our own, achieves a balance between gravitational compression and the energy released by internal fusion.

Brownish dwarf stars, in contrast, never become quite dense enough to fuse hydrogen. The brownish dwarf can still hold substantial reserves of thermal energy and may fuse lithium early in its life cycle, but they ultimately fade away.One of the aspects of dark-brown dwarfs that brand them hard to discern from gas giants is that they're all within ten-15% of Jupiter'south size, though they contain as much every bit 80x Jupiter'due south mass. I don't want to leave you with the impression that there's no discernable difference between a brownish dwarf and a gas giant, because there definitely are — but brown dwarfs are where the line between planet and star begins to get blurry. And now, cheers to Kepler, nosotros take a new set of unusual characteristics — a chocolate-brown dwarf with a tempest the size of Jupiter's Great Red Spot.

Browndwarf

"The star is the size of Jupiter, and its storm is the size of Jupiter's Neat Red Spot," said John Gizis of the University of Delaware, Newark. "We know this newfound storm has lasted at least two years, and probably longer." Gizis is the lead author of a new study appearing in The Astrophysical Journal."

With surface temperatures of "just" 3500 degrees Fahrenheit, W1906+40 is cool enough to have an atmosphere made of minerals. While information technology's not the first "cloudy" brown dwarf observed from Globe, it'due south certainly the only 1 to sustain a storm of this size for such a long period of time.

1 other interesting item of annotation. Jupiter is often referred to equally a "failed star," based on a misreading of Carl Sagan's "Cosmos," where he noted that "Had Jupiter been several dozen times more than massive, the matter in its interior would accept undergone thermonuclear reactions… The largest planet is a star that failed." The second sentence was probably never intended to refer to Jupiter, specifically, but to note that the line between a failed star and a gas behemothic isn't ever clear.

Jupiter couldn't accurately be called a failed star for a simple reason — there'due south not enough mass in the unabridged rest of the solar arrangement to convert Jupiter into a brown dwarf. Jupiter's mass is 317.8x larger than the Earth's, 95.2x larger than Saturn, 14.5x larger than Uranus, and 17.1x larger than Neptune. Add up every other planet, moon, and asteroid in our solar system, and yous'd only increase Jupiter's mass by roughly 40%. That's nowhere nigh enough material to create even a brown dwarf, much less a star that would fuse hydrogen.