Quote:
A team led by Caltech has been focusing telescopes on LSRJ 1835+3259, a brown dwarf sorta-planet 20 light years from Earth, and caught bright flashes coming from the body and bursts of radio activity. This might have been generated in the same way suns do, from magnetic activity on the surface, but according to these new findings, published in the journal Nature, the emissions are actually aurora.
"As the electrons spiral down toward the atmosphere, they produce radio emissions, and then when they hit the atmosphere, they excite hydrogen in a process that occurs at Earth and other planets, albeit tens of thousands of times more intense," said Gregg Hallinan, assistant professor of astronomy at Caltech. "We now know that this kind of auroral behavior is extending all the way from planets up to brown dwarfs."
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2015/07/30 ... 8393103896Neat article on something that doesn't get mentioned much.