MORE EVOLUTIONARY DOGMA WOBBLING:

Newfound Star Sparks Brown-Dwarf Debate (Joshua Roth, January 25, 2005, Sky and Telescope)

[A]n international research team has determined an orbit — and a precise mass — for the youngest brown dwarf yet. There's just one problem: that object, AB Doradus C, isn't a brown dwarf after all. It has an ostensibly stellar mass of 90 Jupiters — up to twice what evolutionary models predict for the 50-million-year-old object given its distance and near-infrared magnitude.

University of Arizona astronomer Laird M. Close discovered AB Dor C on February 4, 2004, using the Very Large Telescope in Chile. When he found the object, it was just 1/6 arcsecond (2.3 astronomical units) from the 7th-magnitude type-K variable star AB Dor A, which is 120 times brighter. His team then combined the adaptive-optics discovery image with existing astrometry from the Hipparcos satellite and radio telescopes to determine AB Dor C's orbit and mass.

Spotting and "weighing" so dim a companion is a noteworthy achievement, astronomers agree. But Close and his colleagues may get more press for the inferences they draw than from their technical prowess. Because AB Dor C's dynamical mass significantly exceeds the predictions of most widely used evolutionary models, Close implies, those models are now suspect. "Some young objects that people are calling brown dwarfs are really low-mass stars," he says, and "things that people are calling free-floating planets, in almost every case, are likely low-mass brown dwarfs."

That doesn't sit well with Isabelle Baraffe (Astronomical Research Center of Lyon, France), one of the reigning model's architects.