A snapshot of a circumstellar disc around a Sun-type star being perturbed by a close star-star encounter (Image: Ingo Thies, Pavel Kroupai and Simon P. Goodwin et al)
IT’S hit-and-run on a cosmic scale. Close encounters between swerving young stars might help spawn the brown dwarfs riddling the Milky Way.
Brown dwarfs are balls of gas whose mass is generally dozens of times that of Jupiter. Like stars, brown dwarfs are capable of fusing a rare form of hydrogen called deuterium, but they are too lightweight to burn ordinary hydrogen and quickly run out of fuel.
The origin of these…
