Brown dwarfs may have gained the unfortunate nickname "failed stars," but new research suggests they can collide and merge for a second chance at success.
Brown dwarfs are cosmic objects with around 13 to 80 times the mass of Jupiter, making them around 0.013 to 0.08 times as massive as the sun. They are deemed as having "failed" because despite forming like normal stars — when vast, overly dense patches of matter collapse in interstellar clouds of gas and dust — they fail to gather enough mass from these clouds to trigger the nuclear fusion of hydrogen to helium in their cores, the process that defines a "main sequence" star, like the sun.
