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Scientists Improve Brown Dwarf Weather Forecasts

posted by martyb on Tuesday August 22 2017, @08:14AM   Printer-friendly
from the What-Would-Gimli-Say? dept.

takyon writes:

https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/news.php?release=2017-221&rn=news.xml&rst=6925

[Researchers] have a new model for explaining how clouds move and change shape in brown dwarfs, using insights from NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope. Giant waves cause large-scale movement of particles in brown dwarfs' atmospheres, changing the thickness of the silicate clouds, researchers report in the journal Science. The study also suggests these clouds are organized in bands confined to different latitudes, traveling with different speeds in different bands.

"This is the first time we have seen atmospheric bands and waves in brown dwarfs," said lead author Daniel Apai, associate professor of astronomy and planetary sciences at the University of Arizona in Tucson.

[...] "The atmospheric winds of brown dwarfs seem to be more like Jupiter's familiar regular pattern of belts and zones than the chaotic atmospheric boiling seen on the Sun and many other stars," said study co-author Mark Marley at NASA's Ames Research Center in California's Silicon Valley.

Zones, spots, and planetary-scale waves beating in brown dwarf atmospheres (DOI: 10.1126/science.aam9848) (DX)

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  • (Score: 3, Informative) by takyon on Tuesday August 22 2017, @04:01PM (2 children)

    by takyon (881) <takyonNO@SPAMsoylentnews.org> on Tuesday August 22 2017, @04:01PM (#557545) Journal

    It is easier to study brown dwarfs than planets because they often do not have a bright host star that obscures them.

    "It is likely the banded structure and large atmospheric waves we found in brown dwarfs will also be common in giant exoplanets," Apai said.

    Using Spitzer, scientists monitored brightness changes in six brown dwarfs over more than a year, observing each of them rotate 32 times. As a brown dwarf rotates, its clouds move in and out of the hemisphere seen by the telescope, causing changes in the brightness of the brown dwarf. Scientists then analyzed these brightness variations to explore how silicate clouds are distributed in the brown dwarfs.

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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 22 2017, @10:50PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 22 2017, @10:50PM (#557757)

    Sunspots do the same. How do they know they are banded?

  • (Score: 2) by hendrikboom on Friday August 25 2017, @06:37PM

    by hendrikboom (1125) Subscriber Badge on Friday August 25 2017, @06:37PM (#559052) Homepage Journal

    I am truly impressed.