A group of Astronomers searching for brown stars across the galaxy recently revealed that the Milky Way could be accommodating 25 to 100 billion brown dwarf stars, and maybe even more.
As part of their research, the group first surveyed five star clusters closer to our solar system before turning their attention to a more distant but young star cluster called RCW 38. RCW 38, which is located at a distance of 1.7 kiloparsecs or 5,544.66 light years away, provided the surprising discovery that brown dwarves are more common than originally believed.
While star clusters close to our solar system usually had one brown dwarf in every seven stars, the RCW 38 cluster shows evidence of five brown dwarves in every 10 stars, or a ratio of 1:2.
"We've found a lot of brown dwarfs in these clusters ... Brown dwarfs form alongside stars in clusters, so our work suggests there are a huge number of brown dwarfs out there," Dr. Aleks Scholz explains. Dr. Scholz is a team member from the University of St. Andrews.
The findings were presented on July 6 at the National Astronomy Meeting held in the United Kingdom. A preprint of the study [PDF] is available online.
Finding Brown Dwarves
The collaborating astronomers used the European Southern Observatory's Very Large Telescope (VLT) located in Northern Chile to observe star cluster RCW 38. The adaptive-optics camera NACO was also used to obtain sharp images like the one below.
