Zenghua Zhang, an astronomer at Nanjing University in China, and his colleagues were combing through catalogs of stars in search of cold brown dwarfs, interstellar objects that fall somewhere between planets and stars.
They found something odd, and rare, in the Milky Way.
First, the astronomers identified what they believed was a lone brown dwarf orbiting a bright single star. Further investigation revealed that the brown dwarf was actually two. After submitting a paper about the discovery, Zhang said, they realized that the bright companion was a pair of stars, too.
“I like to call this a double-double,” said Adam Burgasser, an astrophysicist who leads the Cool Star Lab at the University of California, San Diego, and was involved in the discovery.
A study describing the quadruple star system — a brown dwarf dancing around another, locked in an orbit with two brighter stars also circling each other — was published by the Monthly Notices of Royal Astronomical Society this summer.
The discovery will help scientists untangle the properties of brown dwarfs. These objects form like stars but have too little mass to consistently fuse hydrogen, a process that heats a star and makes it shine. Brown dwarfs have atmospheres similar to gas giant planets, like Jupiter or Saturn. — KATRINA MILLER /NYT
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