Dark Star: The Invisible Universe of Brown Dwarfs - Livestream

Normal stars, like our Sun, shine because they undergo nuclear fusion, turning hydrogen into helium and converting matter into radiation. But what if a star wasn't able to fuse? What would such a "dud" look like? These were purely theoretical question until the 1990s, when the first examples of non-fusing stars, or brown dwarfs, were discovered. Today, many thousands of such objects are known, spanning a wide range of temperatures and masses, and they occupy a unique niche of at the intersection of stars and exoplanets. In this presentation, Prof. Burgasser will introduce the science of brown dwarfs, discuss how they were and continue to be discovered, highlight some of their exceptional properties, and describe how this (mostly) invisible population may provide clues to the early formation and evolutionary history of the Milky Way.

Adam Burgasser is a professor of Physics at UC San Diego, and an astrophysicist who studies the coldest stars, brown dwarfs, and extrasolar planets

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