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This artist's conception shows the relative size of a hypothetical solar system with a planetary-mass brown dwarf as its "sun" (above) compared to the solar system around 55 Cancri, which is a star like our Sun (below). A combination of ground-based and orbiting telescopes discovered Cha 110913-773444 as the smallest brown dwarf known to host a disk of gas and dust, which might one day form planets. At a mass of only 8 Jupiter masses, this brown dwarf so small that it is the size of a planet itself. Astronomers speculate that the disk around this object could have enough mass to make a small gas giant and a few Earth-sized rocky planets.
Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech
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