Quote:
Originally Posted by DemonMonger
Relax man....
1) what is a brown dwarf?
2) why would it not be possible for life to exist at that range from a brown dwarf? 60 AU right?
3) Size / temp / matters 
4) stop insulting people because you feel you have superior knowledge. "what would jesus do?"
All the information you can gather due to your "astro" connection, everyone else can also aquire from the web. Drop the "astro-ego"... |
1) A brown dwarf is a gaseous body made up mostly of Hydrogen and Helium. They are thought to form in the same way as stars but because of lower mass they do not reach the required temperatures to achieve Hydrogen fusion, so they support there rotation through gravitational shrinking. They are assumed to be very similar to M-dwarfs in the early stages of their lifetimes, but as they grow older they shrink down and become much less luminous. The biggest (youngest) brown dwarves are just a bit smaller than a main-sequence M-Dwarf, and the smallest ones are about Jupiter sized, maybe a bit bigger.
2) At 60 AU from a brown dwarf, even if it was the biggest brown dwarf in the world (which would make it about 5 times smaller than the Sun at best if memory serves me right) the amount of light you would get is pathetic. Pluto is much closer to the Sun than 60 AU (somewhere between 40-50 AU, that is the near section of the Kuiper belt which pluto belongs to) and the Sun is much brighter than a Brown Dwarf. Pluto's Temperature is something like -220 degrees celcius. Does that answer why such a planet could never be habitable? If it wasn't enough, Brown Dwarves lose their luminosity rapidly. Life takes Millions of years to develop if the Earth is any example. If we waited millions of years with a brown dwarf, it would be already too faint. It's also unstable due to gravitational collapse.
3) Size of the parent star matters, because massive stars die early (Main sequence lifetime of a few hundred million years) so no massive star hosted system can have light (they are also way too luminous). Small stars are usually too faint. So really, by spectral class alone, many stars are not even candidates.
Same stuff goes for temperature. Only use irony when you have the required knowledge to back it up
4) No comment. Jesus also insults people because he has superior knowledge. He's a clanmate, I know
If you think that being able to browse the web makes you an astrophysicist, you're welcome to try and do my job.
01-09-2012, 03:45 AM
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