It’s twins! ‘Brown dwarf’ that perplexed scientists is not one, but two

For decades, the brown dwarf was an almost mythical being. No one had ever seen one. They existed only in theory, never spotted in the wild.

The discovery by astronomers of Gliese 229B, a mysterious giant world 19 light years from Earth, in 1995 suggested that the legends were true. Objects called brown dwarfs — too big and luminous to be planets, too small and dim to be stars — existed, a never-before-seen type of celestial body.

But astronomers have now made another remarkable discovery. That famous object, which has been the subject of hundreds of scientific papers over nearly 30 years, is not just one brown dwarf. As researchers exclaimed: “It’s twins!”

The twin brown dwarf planets orbit each other about once every 12 Earth days, with a separation 16 times larger than that between the Earth and the Moon

K MILLER, R HURT (CALTECH/IPAC)

Gliese 229B has “remained an enigma for decades”, because something about its

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