Astronomers have detected a giant storm on the surface of a low mass L-dwarf star:
Astronomers have discovered what appears to be a tiny star with a giant, cloudy storm, using data from NASA's Spitzer and Kepler space telescopes. The dark storm is akin to Jupiter's Great Red Spot: a persistent, raging storm larger than Earth.
"The star is the size of Jupiter, and its storm is the size of Jupiter's Great Red Spot," said John Gizis of the University of Delaware, Newark. "We know this newfound storm has lasted at least two years, and probably longer." Gizis is the lead author of a new study appearing in The Astrophysical Journal.
While planets have been known to have cloudy storms, this is the best evidence yet for a star that has one. The star, referred to as W1906+40, belongs to a thermally cool class of objects called L-dwarfs. Some L-dwarfs are considered stars because they fuse atoms and generate light, as our sun does, while others, called brown dwarfs, are known as "failed stars" for their lack of atomic fusion.
[...] Spitzer has observed other cloudy brown dwarfs before, finding evidence for short-lived storms lasting hours and perhaps days.
In the new study, the astronomers were able to study changes in the atmosphere of W1906+40 for two years. The L-dwarf had initially been discovered by NASA's Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer in 2011. Later, Gizis and his team realized that this object happened to be located in the same area of the sky where NASA's Kepler mission had been staring at stars for years to hunt for planets.
WISEP J190648.47+401106.8, also known as W1906+40.
Kepler Monitoring of an L Dwarf II. Clouds with Multiyear Lifetimes
(Score: 2, Informative) by Drake_Edgewater on Monday December 14 2015, @11:55AM
From the article [nasa.gov], the infrared light detected using Spitzer allowed them to distinguish clouds over starspots
Follow-up observations with Spitzer, which detects infrared light, revealed that the dark patch was not a magnetic star spot but a colossal, cloudy storm with a diameter that could hold three Earths.
It seems that brown dwarfs are closer to a Jupiter-like object than a star https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brown_dwarf#/media/File:BrownDwarfComparison-pia12462.jpg [wikipedia.org]