Full Text:
Astronomers using the Karl G. Jansky Very Large Array (VLA) have discovered jets of material ejected by still-forming young brown dwarfs. The discovery is the first direct evidence that brown dwarfs, intermediate in mass between stars and planets, are produced by a scaled-down version of the same process that produces stars.
The astronomers studied a sample of still-forming brown dwarfs in a star-forming region some 450 light-years from Earth in the constellation Taurus, and found that four of them have the type of jets emitted by more-massive stars during their formation. The jets were detected by radio observations with the VLA. The scientists also observed the brown dwarfs with the Spitzer and Herschel space telescopes to confirm their status as very young objects.Image credit: Bill Saxton, NRAO/AUI/NSF
