Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/Harvard-Smithsonian CfA

Planetary Building Blocks Found in Surprising Place

This graph of data from NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope shows that an extraordinarily low-mass brown dwarf, or "failed star," is circled by a disk of planet-building dust. The brown dwarf, called OTS 44, is only 15 times the mass of Jupiter, making it the smallest known brown dwarf to host a planet-forming disk.

Spitzer was able to see this unusual disk by measuring its infrared brightness. Whereas a brown dwarf without a disk (red dashed line) radiates infrared light at shorter wavelengths, a brown dwarf with a disk (orange line) gives off excess infrared light at longer wavelengths.Ê This surplus light comes from the disk itself and is represented here as a yellow dotted line. Actual data points from observations of OTS 44 are indicated with orange dots. These data were acquired using Spitzer's infrared array camera.

About the Object	Object Name: OTS 44 where OTS = Oasa+Tamura+Sugitani Object Type: M9.5 brown dwarf; mass = 15 x mass of Jupiter Position (J2000): RA: 11 10 11.5 Dec: -76 32 13 Distance: 170 parsecs (554 light-years) Magnitude: Ks = 14.61; IRAC 3.6 microns = 13.67 Constellation: Chamaeleon
About the Data	Image Credit: NASA / JPL-Caltech / K. Luhman Instrument: IRAC Wavelength: 3.6, 4.5, 5.8, 8.0 microns Exposure Date: 2004 July 4 Exposure Time: 20.8 seconds Field of View: 5.2 x 5.2 arcminutes Release Date: 07 February 2005
Observers	Dr. Kevin Luhman -- Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, Cambridge, Mass. Dr. Giovanni Fazio -- Harvard Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics Dr. Paola D'Alessia -- Universidad Nacional Autonoma de Mexico Dr. Nuria Calvet -- Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics Dr. Lori Allen -- Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics Dr. Lee Hartmann -- Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics Dr. Thomas Megeath -- Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics Dr. Philip Myers -- Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics

The Spitzer Space Telescope is a NASA mission managed by the Jet Propulsion Laboratory. This website is maintained by the Spitzer Science Center, located on the campus of the California Institute of Technology and part of NASA's Infrared Processing and Analysis Center.