2012 Hype or Hope?  End of the world or new era? Get the facts and decide for yourself!

The average person on the street has no clue about what a brown dwarf is. Why should they? How many people can name the eight planets in order? Other than a high school student who has just taken an astronomy class, who knows what an AU is? The year 2012 may be bringing more people into a NEED to understand some of the above questions.

First. What is a brown dwarf? And why do I need to know any of that?

Brown dwarfs are sub-stellar objects. They a mass below what’s necessary to maintain hydrogen-burning nuclear fusion reactions in their cores as do stars. Brown dwarfs occupy the mass range between that of large gas giant planets and the lowest mass stars. Currently there is some debate as to what criterion to use to define the separation between a brown dwarf from a giant planet at very low brown dwarf masses.

Because they can’t maintain the hydrogen-burning nuclear fusion, they appear like a charcoal briquette: dark but hot! Thus they are hard to find out there in the universe.

America and many other nations are very, very interested in attempting to discover how many are out there and if we’re about to see a visitation for one in particular. Mythology tells us that there was one that visited us about 3,600 years ago or so and the results were interpreted in the Bible and called the plagues of Egypt. This particular brown dwarf goes by the name of Planet X or Nibiru and many thinks we’ll see another visit between 2011 and 2013. Can you say 2012?

The Herschel Space Observatory will be launched later this year to study molecular chemistry in the universe and more specifically the light of far infrared and sub-millimeter portions of the spectrum. Can you say Planet X? This space probe is to enhance the ability of the Spitzer mission (2006) which is the largest telescope launched into space and which imaged a brown dwarf orbiting a larger and brighter star- one that’s 50x the size of Jupiter.

We’re on the hunt for any and all brown dwarfs, before they find us, we want to find them. We’re especially interested in one such object. We want to know what BROWN do for you (and to us).