by Andy Lloyd

7th April 2010

from DarkStar1 Website

 

Dark Star-like objects are starting to be discovered, in parts of the Milky Way thick with brown dwarfs.

 

One of these newly discovered companion objects, of between 5-10 Jupiter masses, lies in orbit around a brown dwarf at an equivalent distance to our Sun's gas giants. Given that the parent star is only a brown dwarf star itself, this is a considerable distance - well beyond the parent's initial proto-planetary disk.

 

The companion sub-brown dwarf has also formed in less than one million years - a staggeringly short period of time. The implications of this are huge, at least for the theory on this website.

 

It means that these large companion objects can form at a very wide distance from their parents, using unexpected planet-forming mechanisms.

"Their investigations of the nature of this mysterious object and its companion brown dwarf have revealed a new mechanism that Nature can use to make orbiting planetary-mass objects.

 

"Our research demonstrates that nature can make planetary-mass bodies through the same mechanism that builds stars - and that the mystery object has both planet-like and star-like characteristics," said [Kevin] Luhman [of Penn State University].

"The most interesting implication of this result is that it shows that the process that makes binary stars extends all the way down to planetary masses -- so it appears that nature is able to make planetary-mass companions through two very different mechanisms."

I've often discussed the likelihood that a Dark Star in our own solar system would have formed as part of a cluster in the very early days of the Sun's own birth.

 

In such a scenario, we simply don't need to consider how a part of the Sun's protoplanetary disk needs to extend out to comet distances to accrete enough matter for a gas giant/sub-brown dwarf to form. A speckled cluster of adjacent star-forming material could create a wide-binary sub-brown dwarf at a great distance.

 

Possibly more than one!

 

This latest discovery adds weight to this concept, and opens up the potential for the discovery of a Dark Star object orbiting our own sun.



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