BROWN-DWARF BINARY MAY CHALLENGE THEORIES

At this week's American Astronomical Society meeting in Minneapolis,
Minnesota, Vanderbilt University astronomer Yilen Gomez Maqueo Chew and five colleagues presented detailed observations of the first known
eclipsing binary system containing two brown dwarfs -- starlike gas balls
not quite massive enough to sustain nuclear fusion in their cores. Seen
from Earth as a single point of light, the system resides in the Orion
Nebula (M42) and is therefore several million years old -- ancient in
human terms, but extremely young by the standards that apply to
lightweight stars.

Gomez Maqueo Chew's team has monitored the "star" over the past three years with the 1.3-meter SMARTS telescope at the Cerro Tololo
Inter-American Observatory in Chile. The team nailed down the major
characteristics of both of the system's brown dwarfs by garnering two
complementary kinds of data...

> http://SkyandTelescope.com/news/article_1525_1.asp