Scientists Using NASA Kepler And Spitzer Discover Storm On Failed Star

Scientists Using NASA Kepler And Spitzer Discover Storm On Failed Star - Jupiter’s Great Red Spot is a giant spinning anticyclonic storm which, according to studies, has lasted for at least 185 years and possibly as long as 350 years or more. It’s akin to normally appearing hurricanes here on Earth - but unlike Earth’s storms, Jupiter’s massive spinning Great Red Spot is a persistent body, although it’s shrinking according to latest calculations published at the NASA website in May, 2014.

Now, for the first time, scientists have found another humongous alien storm but not on another gas giant.

As reported by NASA, scientists using data from the Kepler and Spitzer space telescopes have discovered a raging storm at one of the poles of a failed star. 

Also called brown dwarfs, failed stars are too big to be called planets (or gas giants), but they’re too small to sustain nuclear fusion reaction at their cores. In short, brown dwarfs are transitional objects classified between a “star” and a “planet.”

The research was published in the Astrophysical Journal on November 4.

John Gizis of the University of Delaware, Newark has told the NASA Press website that this cool star named W1906+40 “is the size of Jupiter, and its storm is the size of the Great Red Spot.” He also added that they know that this newfound star storm “has lasted at least two years, and probably longer.”

The star in the study belongs to a thermally cool class of objects called L-dwarfs. Its temperature is about 3,500 degrees Fahrenheit which may sound scorching hot, but as far as stars go, it’s “relatively cool.”

Scientists using the Kepler Space Telescope identify planets by looking for dips in star brightness, or when planets pass in front of their host stars. In this case, scientists knew the dips in the star’s brightness were not coming from planets, but they thought they might be looking at a star spot - which is like the Sun’s sunspots.

NASA says star spots would also cause dips in light as they rotate around the star.

Using Spitzer, scientists have conducted follow-up observations  - and they’ve found that the dark patch was not a magnetic star spot, but a cloudy storm big enough to hold three Earth-sized planets. The gigantic storm rotates around the failed star about every nine hours.

And if we could somehow travel there, NASA says the storm would look like a dark mark near the polar top of the star (and not a large cloudy object like hurricanes on Earth). Source: StGist

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