WASHINGTON—The weather report is in for the two brown dwarfs—celestial bodies bigger than a planet but smaller than a star—closest to us. It is inclement, to put it mildly: blazingly hot, with a toxic chemical cocktail swirling in the atmosphere and clouds of silicate particles blowing around like a Saharan dust storm.
Researchers have used James Webb Space Telescope observations to conduct detailed examinations of the atmospheric conditions on brown dwarfs, specifically a pair that orbit each other around six light years from Earth, quite close by cosmic standards. A light-year is the distance light travels in a year, 5.9 trillion miles (9.5 trillion km).
