The shadow doesn’t know much about the end of winter plus the Brown Dwarf stars story

The amazing universe of Brown Dwarf stars: the most numerous of all in the galaxy, they form like normal stars do but lack the mass needed to fuse hydrogen and helium. They are considered to be more like gas giant planets with complex atmospheres. One such star being studied by astronomers at the University of Arizona has revealed its atmosphere to contain hot grains of sand, liquid drops of iron and other exotic compounds. Astronomers used infrared instruments on the Huddle Space Telescope and Spizter Space Telescope to detect infrared energies from different depths in the star’s atmosphere.

Saturday, Feb. 2 is the first cross quarter day of the year – Groundhog Day! The shadow thing is more of a celebration than anything else , just as other cross quarter days like Halloween, they’ are seasonal time markers.

Sky watching this week: you can see Jupiter and Aldebaran in the evening, Saturn in the pre-dawn sky.

Photo credit: NASA