It's raining molten iron and 'snowing' hot sand! But don' worry, it's not here on Earth. Scientists believe that molten-iron rain and hot sand 'snow' together with violent storm clouds are possible on the surface of brown dwarfs.
This announcement was made at the 223rd meeting of the American Astronomical Society in Washington, D.C.
Brown dwarfs are 'failed stars' which don't turn into fully-fledged suns for lack of mass. They are unable to fuse hydrogen into helium, which is the main energy source for stars. Now new data from the Spitzer Space Telescope suggest that most brown dwarfs are experiencing storms all over their surface.
Stanimir Metchev of the University of Western Ontario, Canada, said, "As the brown dwarfs spin on their axis, the alternation of what we think are cloud-free and cloudy regions produces a periodic brightness variation that we can observe. These are signs of patchiness in the cloud cover."
He also explained, "Spitzer is in space, above the thermal glow of the Earth's atmosphere, and it has the sensitivity required to see variations in the brown dwarfs' brightness."
From what they saw, scientists think that these cloudy regions on the surface of brown dwarfs are torrential storms accompanied by winds and possibly extremely violent lightning. And because brown dwarfs are generally too hot for water to rain, and because their clouds are made of hot sand, molten iron, or salts, it is very likely that instead of water, it rains molten iron on brown dwarfs.
A team picked one brown dwarf system - Luhman 16AB - which is just 6.5 light-years away from Earth. The team's telescopes detected hurricane-force winds of 100-400mph, tempeatures of up t 1,227C (2,240F; 1,500 Kelvin), and clouds covering about half of the surfaces of the brown dwarfs.
The team also discovered the some brown dwarfs rotate much more slowly than expected, opening up the possibility, to scientists, that they may harbor undiscovered planets that may be the cause of the slowdown in the rotation of the brown dwarfs.
Spitzer was used to observe 44 brown dwarfs over a course of 20 hours as part of a Spitzer program named 'Weather on Other Worlds.'
