300 Light-Years Away, a Star Is Slowly Snacking on a Brown Dwarf
Discover how an anomaly that has puzzled astronomers for years was solved, and what it can tell us about how stellar systems interact.
Astronomers have discovered a star slowly consuming a brown dwarf, located 300 light-years away in the Milky Way. The unusual signal puzzled Kevin Burdge, a professor of physics at MIT, who first observed the anomaly while examining data from the Zwicky Transient Facility. Initially, he thought it might be a black widow binary system, but it didn't fit that pattern.
After further investigation with Aaron Householder, a graduate student in MIT's Department of Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences, they concluded the star (ZTF J0440+2325) was orbiting a brown dwarf. Brown dwarfs are objects larger than planets but smaller than stars, unable to emit starlight. The brown dwarf is approximately 25 Jupiters in size, while the star is 85 Jupiters.
The star's orbit around the brown dwarf is smaller than the diameter of the sun, making their proximity quite close in astronomical terms. The team simulated the interactions between particles on the brown dwarf and the star, which indicated that the star is indeed accreting or "snacking" on the brown dwarf at a very slow rate. The rate of consumption is enough to fill about 40 million dump trucks every second, potentially taking billions of years for the star to consume the brown dwarf completely.
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