'Gas of life' is inexplicably present in 'planet from nowhere'

What many scientists hope to capture in habitable exoplanets has now appeared in a type of celestial body that is difficult to define .

A research team led by Dr. Jackie Faherty from the American Museum of Natural History discovered puzzling methane emissions from a half-star, half-planet object, called a brown dwarf.

The signal of methane in the spectrum of a celestial body is a treasure for astrobiologists, because this greenhouse gas is classified as one of the most potential "markers of life" .

However, people hope to find it on exoplanets with elements that support life, not something monstrous and deadly like a brown dwarf.

Brown dwarf W1935 - (Graphic image: NASA/ESA/CSA/STSc).

That brown dwarf is named CWISEP J193518.59-154620.3 (W1935 for short) , isolated, has a temperature of about 208 degrees Celsius, located 47 light years away from us and belongs to the constellation Sagittarius.

The authors used the James Webb space telescope of NASA/ESA/CSA (US - European - Canadian space agencies) and discovered additional strange methane emissions. 

Puzzled by that, they tried modeling and discovered something even more interesting: W1935 may have a temperature inversion - a phenomenon in which the atmosphere becomes warmer as altitude increases.

Temperature inversions can easily occur with planets orbiting stars, because of the heat from their parent star.

To be able to emit methane in the absence of living organisms and reverse temperatures like Jupiter and Saturn, it must have auroras.

But auroras are also a phenomenon that requires fierce stellar winds from the parent star to hit the magnetosphere.

However, brown dwarfs do not have a parent star. 

This unusual type of object is called a brown dwarf but is not actually a star.

They are considered a "failed star" because they are too small for a star and cannot sustain nuclear fusion in the core, but are too large for a planet to achieve and do not have a parent star. .

Therefore, brown dwarfs can also be considered a type of "high-class planet" , born from nothingness, that is, from chaotic clouds of gas and dust between stars, the way stars are born, instead of from the protoplanetary disk of a parent star.

More observations are needed, but researchers speculate that one explanation for the auroras on W1935 could be an active but as yet undiscovered moon.

Despite everything, every detail in this new discovery adds to the mystery surrounding the type of object called "brown dwarf".