Benjamin Dean Lecture: Planets or Stars? - The Dark Universe of Brown Dwarfs

For thousands of years, humans have distinguished two types of bright celestial lights: the firmament of the fixed stars and the clockwork machinations of the wandering planets. With the discovery of a vast population of brown dwarfs - low-mass objects exhibiting both stellar and planetary characteristics - these long-held distinctions have been upended, revealing a continuum of gas giants spanning Jupiter to the Sun. Prof. Burgasser will describe the history of brown dwarf science, from their prediction as dark matter candidates in the 1960s to their discovery as the Sun's nearest neighbors n the 1990s. He'll then reveal their many fascinating properties, from interiors of metallic hydrogen to storms of molten iron, and report on the recent discovery of "room-temperature" stars with the WISE infrared satellite mission.

Speaker: Prof. Adam Burgasser Center for Astrophysics and Space Science, UC San Diego