Pair of Brown Dwarves found

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Only 6.5 light years from Earth they found a "solar system" consisting not of a star and planets, but of two brown dwarves orbiting around each other. Brown dwarves were theorized to exist, but now they are now finding quite a few actual specimens in intersteller space. A brown dwarf is an object bigger than a gas giant planet but smaller than a star. The gas giants in our own solar system generate their own heat through chemical processes. Often their moons receive more heat from the planet then they do from the Sun. But if you took the biggest planet, Jupiter, and multiplied it mass fifty fold it would flick the switch and cause thermo nuclear fusion to kick in, and Jupiter would become an actual star. A red dwarf star, but a full fledged star. But the two bodies in this system are each around 30 times the mass of Jupiter. Big enough to generate a lot of heat, but not enough to trigger thermonuclear fusion. So they stay in the netherworld between planets and stars.

The two are about 325 million miles apart (slightly less than the distance between Jupiter and the Sun). Like Jupiter they probably each have many moons.

lots of gnomes found too

Many years ago, I 'designed' a similar system for the Traveller RPG.  Here is a brief description:

(The referee may use this section for reference, or reveal it’s contents as needed.)

• History: The system is charted, but no complete survey was ever performed.  Both IISS and Merchant Service records cite "Limited Resource Potential" as the reason.

• Stellography: Two Jupiter-sized L5-VI sub-dwarfs ("Brown Dwarfs”) are in close orbit with each other – period is 153 hours.  They are tide-locked.  At their current rate of thermal emission, they will cease to provide sufficient heat for the planet in about 1.5 million years.

• Radiation: Most of the 'stellar' radiation is in the near infrared; the rest is gravitational.  There are residual magnetic fields around both brown dwarfs, which have captured very few high-energy particles -- there is a minimal radiation hazard.

• Spectroscopy: Spectroscopy will reveal that the smaller of the two (Class L4.9, Mass: 10.2j) is warmer and has more methane.  The larger one (Class L5.1-VI, Mass: 9.8j) is cooler and has more ammonia.  There is an abundance of lithium compounds in both atmospheres.

It looks like I may have to revise the data.

It's all good...

^Nice work! I hope some players stopped to admire the scientifically up-to-date scenery...

I'm intrigued by the idea that there are an awful lot of brown dwarfs out there- probably far more than yellow dwarfs like our Sun. In two of Charles Stross's novels, "Accelerando" and "Glasshouse," there's a civilisation that avoids unwanted attention by only settling resource-poor brown dwarf systems that no-one else can be bothered to exploit.