Turbulent skies of nearby 'failed star' marked by thick cloud bands

[Admin]

Scientists have spotted evidence of Jupiter-like stripes in the thick atmosphere of a nearby brown dwarf, a new study reports — and this evidence was gathered in a novel way.

Turbulent skies of nearby 'failed star' marked by thick cloud bands : Read more

 

[rod]

Luhman 16A and B are an interesting and well studied binary brown dwarf system. http://exoplanet.eu/catalog/luhman_16_a/, this shows the pair have orbital period about 27.5 years. Astrometry was used to determine accurate distance and masses for the pair too from Gaia DR2, https://www.aanda.org/articles/aa/abs/2018/10/aa33626-18/aa33626-18.html

"Using Gaia DR2 as astrometric reference field, we derived the absolute proper motion and updated the absolute parallax of the binary to 501.557 ± 0.082 mas. We refined the individual dynamical masses of LUH 16 to 33.5 ± 0.3 M Jup (component A) and 28.6 ± 0.3 M Jup (component B), which corresponds to a relative precision of ∼1% and is three to four times more precise than previous estimates."

A parallax of 501.557 mas is 6.5 LY distance or 1.994 pc. Some cool, geeky stats