According to research from Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias (IAC) and the Instituto Nacional de Astrofísica, Óptica y Electrónica (INAOE), Mexico, scientists have discovered the lithium in the oldest and coldest brown dwarf.
Reed 1B is a substellar object that dates back to the pre-formation of the binary system to which it belongs, and it contains the earliest known lithium deposits in our cosmic neighborhood. The OSIRIS spectrometer of the Gran Telescopio Canario (GTC) at the Rokederos Muchachos Observatory in the Canary Islands was used to make this finding (Garafia, La Palma). The research was recently published in the Royal Astronomical Society’s Monthly Bulletin.
Brown dwarfs are the natural link between stars and planets, sometimes known as “coffee-colored dwarfs” or “failed stars.” They are larger than Jupiter, but not huge enough to burn the hydrogen that allows the stars to glow. As a result, these subsites were not discovered until the mid-1990s, when they were discovered by observers. They’re particularly intriguing because it was projected that some of them would preserve their lithium content, which is commonly referred to as “white oil” due to its rarity and significance.
Astronomers have been observing and tracking the orbits of the binaries generated by brown dwarfs in the vicinity of the sun for the past two decades. They calculated their mass dynamically using Kepler’s principles, which were created by Johannes Kepler in the seventeenth century to describe the motions of astronomical objects moving under the influence of mutual gravity, such as the Earth-Sun system. The primary component’s mass may be adequate to burn lithium in some of these systems, but the second component may not. Theoretical models, on the other hand, have yet to be put to the test.
Lithium observations in brown dwarfs allow us to estimate their masses with a high degree of precision based on nuclear processes. In this method, the thermocouple masses discovered will be more closely aligned with the dynamic masses discovered in the orbital analysis. Lithium, on the other hand, has a dynamic mass that is 10% lower than expected by the most recent theoretical models, according to researchers. This disparity appears to be significant, implying that there is still something we don’t know about brown dwarf behavior.