Peppered throughout the universe are balls of gas that never got promoted to stardom. In a strange twist, evidence has just emerged that the most famous of these orbs is actually a double-act.
Where astronomers thought there was one brown dwarf, there’s actually two. And the object they studied isn’t just any ordinary brown dwarf. Gliese 229B was the first known brown dwarf, discovered in 1995. These objects are much larger than gas giant planets. Gliese 229B was estimated to be about 70 times more massive than Jupiter. The sizes of brown dwarfs brought them daringly close to becoming stars, though they didn’t quite cross that threshold.
