Weather on a Brown Dwarf.

The Very Large Telescope has recently been in use to map out the weather of a Brown Dwarf, specifically WISE J104915.57-531906.1B. The star is known as Luhman 16B and is one of tworecently discovered brown dwarfs forming a pair only six light-years from the Sun. The distance enables astronomers to detect this faint star, which is in the gap between Jupiter sized planets and low mass, cool stars. In the Hertzsprung-Russell diagram, this would be to the lower right, if it were to be considered a star. They are the most elusive of the stars and they do not have enough mass to initiate nuclear fusion. Astronomers using ESO's Very Large telescope managed to map out light and dark features on the surface of Luhman 16B and a comment from Ian Crossfield, (Max Planck Institute for Astronomy, Heidelberg, Germany), the lead author of the new paper, sums up the results: "Previous observations suggested that brown dwarfs might have mottled surfaces, but now we can actually map them. Soon, we will be able to watch cloud patterns form, evolve, and dissipate on this brown dwarf—eventually, exometeorologists may be able to predict whether a visitor to Luhman 16B could expect clear or cloudy skies."
They were able to do this by what I thought to be an interesting way of imaging differences in luminosities, using the CRIRES instrument of the VLT. This stands for CRyogenic high-resolution InfraRed Echelle spectrograph and it provides a solving power of up to 10^5 in the spectral range, optimizing resolution through a mosaic of Alladin arrays which allows the observation of fainter stars such ass brown dwarfs with greater detail. Studying the atmospheres of brown dwarfs might give astronomers an idea of the atmospheres of young, giant gas planets. 

The brown dot is where I believe brown dwarfs to be located. Perhaps even out of the graph.

The figure shows the object at six equally spaced times as it rotates once on its axis. Credit: ESO/I. Crossfield
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