A giant planet, sometimes referred to as a jovian planet, is a diverse type of planet much larger than Earth. Giant planets are usually primarily composed of low-boiling point materials (volatiles), rather than rock or other solid matter, but massive solid planets can also exist. There are four such planets in the Solar System: Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune. Many extrasolar giant planets have been identified.
Brown dwarfs are substellar objects that have more mass than the biggest gas giant planets, but less than the least massive main-sequence stars. Their mass is approximately 13 to 80 times that of Jupiter (MJ)—not big enough to sustain nuclear fusion of ordinary hydrogen (1H) into helium in their cores, but massive enough to emit some light and heat from the fusion of deuterium (2H). The most massive ones can fuse lithium (7Li).
A red dwarf is the smallest kind of star on the main sequence. Red dwarfs are by far the most common type of fusing star in the Milky Way, at least in the neighborhood of the Sun. However, due to their low luminosity, individual red dwarfs cannot be easily observed. From Earth, not one star that fits the stricter definitions of a red dwarf is visible to the naked eye. Proxima Centauri, the star nearest to the Sun, is a red dwarf, as are fifty of the sixty nearest stars. According to some estimates, red dwarfs make up three-quarters of the fusing stars in the Milky Way.
Epsilon Indi, Latinized from ε Indi, is a star system located at a distance of approximately 12 light-years from Earth in the southern constellation of Indus. The star has an orange hue and is faintly visible to the naked eye with an apparent visual magnitude of 4.83. It consists of a K-type main-sequence star, ε Indi A, and two brown dwarfs, ε Indi Ba and ε Indi Bb, in a wide orbit around it. The brown dwarfs were discovered in 2003. ε Indi Ba is an early T dwarf (T1) and ε Indi Bb a late T dwarf (T6) separated by 0.6 arcseconds, with a projected distance of 1460 AU from their primary star.
A super-Jupiter is a gas giant exoplanet that is more massive than the planet Jupiter. For example, companions at the planet–brown dwarf borderline have been called super-Jupiters, such as around the star Kappa Andromedae.
OGLE-TR-122 is a binary stellar system containing one of the smallest main-sequence stars whose radius has been measured. It was discovered when the Optical Gravitational Lensing Experiment (OGLE) survey observed the smaller star eclipsing the larger primary. The orbital period is approximately 7.3 days. The system's primary is thought to resemble the Sun.
Internal heat is the heat source from the interior of celestial objects, such as stars, brown dwarfs, planets, moons, dwarf planets, and even asteroids such as Vesta, resulting from contraction caused by gravity, nuclear fusion, tidal heating, core solidification, and radioactive decay. The amount of internal heating depends on mass; the more massive the object, the more internal heat it has; also, for a given density, the more massive the object, the greater the ratio of mass to surface area, and thus the greater the retention of internal heat. The internal heating keeps celestial objects warm and active.
HD 190228 is a star with an orbiting substellar companion in the northern constellation of Vulpecula. Its apparent magnitude is 7.30 – too faint to be seen with the naked eye – and the absolute magnitude is 3.34. Based on parallax measurements, it is located at a distance of 205 light-years from the Sun. The system is drifting closer with a radial velocity of −50 km/s.
The TW Hydrae association is a group of very young low-mass stars and substellar objects located approximately 25–75 parsecs from Earth. They share a common motion and appear to all be roughly the same age, 10±3 million years old. It is the youngest such association within 100 pc from Earth.
This page describes exoplanet orbital and physical parameters.
36 Ursae Majoris is a double star in the northern constellation of Ursa Major. With an apparent visual magnitude of 4.8, it can be seen with the naked eye in suitable dark skies. Based upon parallax measurements, this binary lies at a distance of 42 light-years from Earth.
OGLE-TR-123 is a binary stellar system containing one of the smallest main-sequence stars whose radius has been measured. It was discovered when the Optical Gravitational Lensing Experiment (OGLE) survey observed the smaller star eclipsing the larger primary. The orbital period is approximately 1.80 days.
CoRoT-3b is a brown dwarf or massive extrasolar planet with a mass 21.66 times that of Jupiter. The object orbits an F-type star in the constellation of Aquila. The orbit is circular and takes 4.2568 days to complete. It was discovered by the French-led CoRoT mission which detected the dimming of the parent star's light as CoRoT-3b passes in front of it.
Gliese 758 is a star in the northern constellation of Lyra. At about magnitude 6 it is a challenge to view with the naked eye even in good seeing conditions, but can be easily seen through a small telescope or binoculars. Parallax measurements from the Hipparcos mission give it an estimated distance of around 50.9 light-years from Earth.
G 196-3 is a young low-mass M dwarf type star which is about 100 million years old. The star is located within the Ursa Major constellation about 71.1 light years away from the Earth. During observations by Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias in Tenerife, Spain in 1998, a substellar-mass object was discovered to orbit approximately 300 astronomical units (AU) from the star. It was detected using direct imaging.
Deuterium fusion, also called deuterium burning, is a nuclear fusion reaction that occurs in stars and some substellar objects, in which a deuterium nucleus and a proton combine to form a helium-3 nucleus. It occurs as the second stage of the proton–proton chain reaction, in which a deuterium nucleus formed from two protons fuses with another proton, but can also proceed from primordial deuterium.
Kappa Andromedae b is a directly imaged substellar object and likely superjovian-mass planet orbiting Kappa Andromedae, a young B9IV star in the Andromeda constellation, about 170 light-years away. The companion's mass is roughly 13 times the mass of Jupiter. As early history on Kappa And b is filled with debate over whether it is an exoplanet or a brown dwarf, some scientists have broadly described it as a "super-Jupiter" object.
A stellar core is the extremely hot, dense region at the center of a star. For an ordinary main sequence star, the core region is the volume where the temperature and pressure conditions allow for energy production through thermonuclear fusion of hydrogen into helium. This energy in turn counterbalances the mass of the star pressing inward; a process that self-maintains the conditions in thermal and hydrostatic equilibrium. The minimum temperature required for stellar hydrogen fusion exceeds 107 K (10 MK), while the density at the core of the Sun is over 100 g/cm3. The core is surrounded by the stellar envelope, which transports energy from the core to the stellar atmosphere where it is radiated away into space.
Stellification is a theoretical process by which a brown dwarf star or Jovian-class planet is turned into a star, or by which the luminosity of dim stars is greatly magnified.
Isabelle Baraffe is a French physicist and Professor of Astrophysics at the University of Exeter. Her research involves the development of new astrophysical models to understand low mass stars and exoplanets. She was awarded a Royal Society Wolfson Research Merit Award in 2010 and delivered the 2023 European Astronomical Society Lodewijk Woltjer Lecture.
