Hi All

The Deuterium burning limit is one decent benchmark ~ 13 Jupiter-masses before a brown dwarf will fuse its deuterium and lithium.

Jupiter has a long way to go before it can be rightly called anything like a star.

Alternatively the Degenerate Matter limit might be another option ~ 6.24E+27 kg. Past that mass and the radius actually shrinks the more mass you pile one because the core is degenerate.

However if the super-jovians [still a decent name IMHO] form via core accretion from a stellar disk then can we rightly call them brown dwarfs? BDs are normally thought to have collapsed directly from separate Jeans Mass clumps in the protostellar nebula, not via core-accretion.

However things are never so clear cut. Alan Boss' disk instability model makes jovians out of Jeans Mass clumps - albeit ones orbitting in a stellar disk. Whitworth et al have simulated interactions between stellar disks, finding that a multitude of BDs and smaller mass-clumps can be made and scattered in this manner. And Woolfson's Capture Theory also simulates similar planet formation processes out of the Sun encountering an uncollapsed protostar in the embedding phase in their common birth nebula.

And what if we find super-jovian clumps of "ices" like Hal Clement's Mesklin?

I think super-Jovian says enough with being partisan about planet formation theories.

Adam