whoa!

Astronomers really think they have figured things out, they find something extremely unusual.  If you have heard of brown dwarf stars or not, they pretty much straddle the line between stars and, at least in the way we are able to understand them.  And depending on who you ask, it is kind of like the deep dish Chicago style pizza vs. thin crust New York style debate 😉  They are not considered to be either however according to some folks:

There is a peculiar system 1,600 light-years from our solar system. It is composed of two brown dwarfs, massive objects too big to be planets and too small to fuse hydrogen and become stars. But that is not the strange part: Scientists have now discovered a Venus-sized planet around the smaller brown dwarf.

What do you think about them or do you have an opinion about this?

Here is a bit more information on this completely unusual find:

A rocky planet orbiting a brown dwarf has never been observed before. This system is therefore thought to be either a scaled-up version of a moon going around a planet or a scaled-down version of a planet going around a star. The ratio between the mass of the host brown dwarf and that of the planet is the same as the ratio between the Sun and Uranus and between Jupiter and Callisto (its second largest moon). The astronomers argue that this suggests the same mechanisms formed Uranus, Callisto and the new planet.

What do you think?  Is this more common throughout the galaxy and universe or completely rare?  Feel free to comment and we’re looking forward to hearing more.

thanks to iflscience.com for the great info

thanks to NASA for the pic