Nearby brown dwarf’s ‘weather’ mapped in unprecedented detail

Researchers at McGill University and collaborating institutions have mapped the atmospheric features of a planetary-mass brown dwarf, a type of space object that is neither a star nor a planet, existing in a category in-between. This particular brown dwarf’s mass, however, is just at the threshold between being a Jupiter-like planet and a brown dwarf. It has thus also been called a free-floating, or rogue, planet, not bound to a star.