YET another planetary system in the making has been discovered – but this one is a bit different from the many other extrasolar systems discovered so far. Instead of surrounding a sun-like star, it is centred on a brown dwarf that is itself barely bigger than a giant planet. And despite the host star lacking the nuclear reactions that make our sun shine, its disc could one day spawn habitable Earth-sized planets.
The discovery calls for a rethink of how many different kinds of planetary systems there might be. “We just think of planets forming around stars about the mass of…
