HONG KONG: The beautiful ‘northern lights’-like aurora is not limited to the solar system – in fact it is not even limited to planets as astronomers have discovered the first aurora ever seen in an object beyond our Solar System and that too on a failed star aka brown dwarf.
The LSR J1835+3259 is a brown dwarf some 20 light away and when observed using both radio and optical telescopes, a team led by Gregg Hallinan, assistant professor of astronomy at Caltech, found that the failed stars are more-like supersized planets with planetary features such as powerful auroras near their magnetic poles.
According to researchers, the newly discovered aurora is 10,000 times more powerful than any previously seen. The discovery reveals a major difference between the magnetic activity of more-massive stars and that of brown dwarfs and planets, the scientists say.
“All the magnetic activity we see on this object can be explained by powerful auroras,” said Gregg Hallinan, of the California Institute of Technology (Caltech). “This indicates that auroral activity replaces solar-like coronal activity on brown dwarfs and smaller objects,” he added.
Astronomers observed LSR J1835+3259, using the Karl G. Jansky Very Large Array (VLA) at radio wavelengths, along with the 5-meter Hale Telescope on Palomar Mountain and the 10-meter Keck Telescope in Hawaii at optical wavelengths. The combination of radio and optical observations showed that the object, 18 light-years from Earth, has characteristics unlike any seen in more-massive stars.
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