{"id":242692,"date":"2026-08-14T01:24:29","date_gmt":"2026-08-14T06:24:29","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2026\/08\/tess-discovers-a-rare-brown-dwarf-orbiting-a-massive-aging-star"},"modified":"2026-08-14T01:24:29","modified_gmt":"2026-08-14T06:24:29","slug":"tess-discovers-a-rare-brown-dwarf-orbiting-a-massive-aging-star","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2026\/08\/tess-discovers-a-rare-brown-dwarf-orbiting-a-massive-aging-star","title":{"rendered":"TESS discovers a rare brown dwarf orbiting a massive, aging star"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a class=\"aligncenter blog-photo\" href=\"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog.images\/tess-discovers-a-rare-brown-dwarf-orbiting-a-massive-aging-star.jpg\"><\/a><\/p>\n<p>For decades, astronomers lumped brown dwarfs into a single category defined by mass alone\u2014too big to be classified as planets but too small to become stars. However, this definition ignores the two very different mechanisms that can form them: the direct collapse of gas clouds and formation within the accretion disks of massive stars.<\/p>\n<p>Through a new analysis of NASA\u2019s Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS), astronomers led by Nino Ephremidze at Harvard University have made the clearest observation to date of a brown dwarf in orbit around a massive, aging star, potentially offering important new clues about how these planet-like bodies form. Their <a href=\"https:\/\/arxiv.org\/abs\/2608.03094\" target=\"_blank\">results<\/a> have been posted to the <i>arXiv<\/i> preprint server.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>For decades, astronomers lumped brown dwarfs into a single category defined by mass alone\u2014too big to be classified as planets but too small to become stars. However, this definition ignores the two very different mechanisms that can form them: the direct collapse of gas clouds and formation within the accretion disks of massive stars. Through [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":427,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-242692","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-space"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/242692","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/427"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=242692"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/242692\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=242692"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=242692"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=242692"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}