Using the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), astronomers have investigated a "failed star," or brown dwarf, nicknamed "The Accident." Their results may help solve a long-standing mystery surrounding the solar system's gas giants, Jupiter and Saturn.
Brown dwarfs get their unfortunate label of "failed stars" due to the fact that they form from collapsing clouds of gas and dust like stars, but they fail to gather enough matter to achieve the mass needed to trigger the nuclear fusion of hydrogen to helium in their cores, the process that defines what a star is. Brown dwarfs have masses between 13 and 80 times the mass of Jupiter, or 0.013 and 0.08 times the mass of the sun.
