Brown Dwarf

This article covers the pre-stellar type Brown Dwarf, an object that is too small to fuse Hydrogen and too large to be a Gas Giant.

• Please see Star: Origin & Formation section at article Star.

Description (Specifications)

Once a Gas Giant reaches about 170,000km diameter, it may become more massive, but it doesn't become much larger - the core density just increases instead. These become very hot due to gravitational heating and reach temperatures at which Lithium can begin to fuse. This lasts a very short time and then the Lithium is used up and the object cools. These objects are Brown Dwarfs.

A Brown Dwarf may resemble a Gas Giant in many ways. Anyone attempting to harvest fuel from their atmosphere should keep careful watch on their manoeuvre drive as their gravity is strong and you will require at least 3-G of acceleration (sometimes more) to regain orbit.

History & Background (Dossier)

Brown Dwarfs have been known-of since about a century before spaceflight. They are relatively common.

All Brown Dwarfs are too light to fuse hydrogen as a fuel. They may fuse Lithium in their early history (and reach spectral class M), but are generally spectral classes L, T and Y as they subsequently cool.

References & Contributors (Sources)

This page uses content from Wikipedia. The original article was at Brown_dwarf. The list of authors can be seen in the page history. The text of Wikipedia is available under the Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

This list of sources was used by the Traveller Wiki Editorial Team and individual contributors to compose this article. Copyrighted material is used under license from Far Future Enterprises or by permission of the author. The page history lists all of the contributions.

• Author: BackworldTraveller