https://phys.org/news/2022-01-team-astr ... dwarf.html
by Arizona State University
A team of astronomers, led by Arizona State University undergraduate student Emma Softich, has discovered a rare pair of brown dwarfs that has the widest separation of any brown dwarf binary system found to date.
Brown dwarfs are celestial objects that are smaller than a normal star and without sufficient mass to sustain nuclear fusion, but that are hot enough to radiate energy. Many brown dwarfs have been discovered with data from NASA's Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE) via the Backyard Worlds: Planet 9 citizen science project, which solicits help from the public to search the WISE image data bank to find brown dwarfs and low-mass stars, some of the sun's nearest neighbors.
For this study, the team of astronomers inspected images of Backyard Worlds discoveries, where companion brown dwarfs may have been overlooked. In so doing, they discovered a rare brown dwarf binary system (CWISE J014611.20 050850.0AB).
"Wide, low-mass systems like CWISE J014611.20-050850.0AB are usually disrupted early on in their lifetimes, so the fact that this one has survived until now is pretty remarkable," said co-author Adam Schneider of the U.S. Naval Observatory, Flagstaff Station and George Mason University.