Brown dwarfs are supposed to be the ‘Goldilocks’ of celestial objects: lighter than stars, but heavier than gas giants like Jupiter, with a “just right” weight somewhere in between.
But something was amiss with the first known brown dwarf, Gliese 229B. Discovered by Caltech researchers at the Institute's Palomar Observatory in 1994, astronomers noted that although Gliese 229B weighed about 70 times more than Jupiter, it shined much more dimly given its mass.
Although hundreds of papers have been written about Gliese 229B since its discovery, the mystery about the discrepancy between its size and brightness lingered. Now, two teams of astronomers have explained that anomaly: Gliese 229B is actually a pair of tight-knit brown dwarfs, weighing about 38 and 34 times the mass of Jupiter.
