NASA's Webb telescope makes record-breaking discovery of tiniest brown dwarf star

NASA has announced another record-breaking discovery by the James Webb Space Telescope. In a post on X last week, the agency revealed that the world's most powerful observatory has found the tiniest “free-floating” brown dwarf ever discovered. 

Brown dwarfs are objects which are too small to be called a star but are larger than most planets. 

The new picture shared by NASA consists of three brown dwarfs, each having a size smaller than less than eight times the mass of Jupiter. And out of these three, there is one such object only three to four times the mass of Jupiter.

According to NASA, the newfound brown drwaf is located in the star cluster IC 348, located about 1,000 light-years away in the Perseus star-forming region. This cluster is believed to be only about 5 million years old which makes the brown dwarfs in this region relatively bright in infrared light.

The Webb telescope is designed to observe the universe in infrared light which is not visible with naked eyes but can be felt as heat. 

Thanks to Webb's NIRCam (Near-Infrared Camera) and NIRSpec (Near-Infrared Spectrograph), astronomers were able to identify the most promising brown dwarf candidates from their brightness and colors.

According to the computer models, the temperatures of the brown dwarfs ranged from 830°C-1500°C and the smallest of them weighed just three to four times than Jupiter.

Scientists are now grappling with the questions about the formation of these brown dwarfs and if they are brown dwarfs in the first place. While this is yet to be answered, scientists have found a mystery molecule in two of the three Brown Dwarfs.

“This is the first time we’ve detected this molecule in the atmosphere of an object outside our solar system,” explained Catarina Alves de Oliveira, one of the researchers of the study published in Astronomical Journal. 

“Models for brown dwarf atmospheres don’t predict its existence. We’re looking at objects with younger ages and lower masses than we ever have before, and we’re seeing something new and unexpected," Oliveira further said.

Experts now hope that the discovery of more brown dwarfs will help clarify the status of such objects.