Astronomers have found an exotic binary system of two half-planet-half stars

Star formation processes sometimes create mysterious astronomical objects - brown dwarfs,

which are smaller and cooler than stars.And in the most extreme cases, their mass and temperature are equal to the mass and temperature of exoplanets. Like stars, brown dwarfs often wander alone in space, but they are also found in binary systems where two brown dwarfs orbit each other and travel together through the galaxy.

Researchers led by Clémence Fontanivefrom the Center for Space and Habitability (CSH) at the University of Bern have discovered a curious starless binary brown dwarf system. The CFHTWIR-Oph 98 system (or Oph 98 for short) consists of two very low-mass objects Oph 98 A and Oph 98 B. It is located 450 light-years from Earth in the Ophiuchus star cluster. Scientists were surprised by the fact that Oph 98 A and B orbit each other from an amazingly large distance. It is 5 times the distance between Pluto and the Sun and 200 times the distance between the Earth and the Sun. 

Artistic composition of two browndwarfs, in the foreground Oph 98B purple, in the background Oph 98A red. The Oph 98A is the more massive, and therefore the brighter and hotter of the two. The two objects are surrounded by the molecular cloud in which they formed. Credit: University of Berne / Thibaut Roger.

This pair is a rare example of two objects,similar in many respects to extrasolar giant planets orbiting each other without a parent star. The more massive component, Oph 98 A, is a young brown dwarf with a mass 15 times that of Jupiter. Scientists note that the object is located on the border separating brown dwarfs from planets. Its satellite, Oph 98 B, is only 8 times heavier than Jupiter.

Clémence Fontanive and her colleagues discovered the companion Oph 98 A using images from the Hubble Space Telescope. 

The binary system Oph 98 was formed only 3 million years ago. In astronomical time scales, this is literally “yesterday”.

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