James Webb spots record-breaking small, rare kind of brown 'failed' star

The James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) in a new discovery found a record-breaking and extremely brown dwarf, which posed a challenge to scientists' understanding of how stars are born.

This newly spotted brown dwarf has been hanging out in space alone and has a mass of only 3 to 4 times that of Jupiter. This is the lowest-mass object of its kind yet found by the scientists.

The discovery of the brown dwarf has left many scientists questioning how it was formed in the first place. "It's pretty easy for current models to make giant planets in a disc around a star," said astronomer Catarina Alves de Oliveira of the European Space Agency, while speaking to Science Alert.

He added, "But in this cluster, it would be unlikely that this object formed in a disc, instead forming like a star, and three Jupiter masses is 300 times smaller than our Sun. So we have to ask, how does the star formation process operate at such very, very small masses?"

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Science behind 'failed stars'

Brown dwarfs are commonly referred to as "failed stars". A star is a celestial object which gets created from a dense clump in a cloud of dust and gas in space which collapses under gravity.

The starcontinues to grow till it is massive enough for the heat and pressure in its core to turn into hydrogen fusion. The star's minimum mass is generally 80 to 85 times the mass of Jupiter.

A brown dwarf is a similar kind of object which is formed like all other stars, but it does not have enough mass which helps in creating the conditions for hydrogen fusion. However, a brown dwarf is not even a planet.

The term 'brown' in the name refers to how they are small in size compared to the white dwarf stars but bigger compared to the non-glowing 'dark' planets.

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A team of astronomers, headed by Kevin Luhman of Pennsylvania State University, has been trying to discover the smallest of these objects in space.

"One basic question you'll find in every astronomy textbook is, what are the smallest stars? That's what we're trying to answer,” said Luhman.

The James Webb Space Telescope was used by scientists to conduct a survey of the centre of a young star clusternamed IC 348, which was located in the Perseus star-forming region around 1,000 light-years away.

(With inputs from agencies)