This is an example of what a brown dwarf might look like. Brown dwarfs are objects that form like stars, but do not have enough mass to ignite main-sequence nuclear reactions. They are thus not true stars, and may in fact be closer to planets such as...

Artwork of a brown dwarf in the Pleiades star cluster. The Pleiades (or Seven Sisters) is a young open cluster of several dozen hot, middle-aged stars. It is about 130 parsecs away in Taurus. In the 1990s, astronomers discovered several brown dwarfs ...

Gliese 229 is a red dwarf flare star some 19 light-years away in the constellation of Lepus (the Hare). In 1994, astronomers detected a companion object, Gliese 229b, which turned out to be a brown dwarf. Indeed it was the first such object ever to b...

Like Magnetic Accretion, this is an illustration of a type of cataclysmic binary called a polar. However, this is a polar with a difference, for there is a sub-stellar object called a brown dwarf (left) in orbit around the magnetic white dwarf (right...

... th century. This one regards the Sun-like star J1407, around which astronomers have found a curious thing – a planet or brown dwarf encircled by a series of concentric rings. The rings are probably a primitive moon system in the process of forma ...