How does a brown dwarf star form?

Some brown dwarfs are cool enough to maintain atmospheres much like gas giants. Brown dwarfs can host planets, but gas giants can have moons in orbit. So how do you definitively determine whether a free-floating object is a planet or a very cool brown dwarf? read more

Brown dwarfs are thought to form in the same way that stars do - from a collapsing cloud of gas and dust. Brown dwarfs were only a theoretical concept until they were first discovered in 1995. It is now thought that there might be as many brown dwarfs as there are stars. read more

Brown dwarfs are substellar objects that occupy the mass range between the heaviest gas giant planets and the lightest stars, of approximately 13 to 75–80 Jupiter masses (MJ),[1][2] or approximately 7028249999999999999♠2.5×1028 kg to about 7029150000000000000♠1.5×1029 kg. read more

Very interesting to find such clear evidence for a brown dwarf pair at what the star formation community would call the Class 0 phase, by analogy to protostars. read more