Sentences with phrase «sustain nuclear fusion»

However, because of the brown dwarf's small mass, the core does not become hot enough to sustain nuclear fusion, the main source of a star's energy.

On the one hand, brown dwarfs lack the mass to sustain nuclear fusion in their cores.

Brown dwarfs are essentially substellar bodies that failed to gather enough mass during their formative period to sustain the nuclear fusion process raging at the heart of other main sequence stars.

They lack enough mass to sustain nuclear fusion but they are hot enough to glow in the infrared range of the light spectrum.

Although they are as common as stars and form in much the same way, brown dwarfs lack the mass necessary to sustain nuclear fusion reactions.

But Michael Skrutskie, a University of Virginia astronomer and a member of the WISE science team, is especially interested in the satellite's ability to pick out previously unknown brown dwarfs, objects larger than planets but too small to sustain nuclear fusion of hydrogen.

Some MACHOs may be neutron stars left behind after supernovae explosions, but most are thought to be tiny failed stars called brown dwarfs which have a mass of less than 8 per cent that of the Sun and are too small to sustain nuclear fusion reactions.

Brown dwarfs are a strange class of celestial object that have masses so low that their cores never become hot enough to sustain nuclear fusion, which powers stars.

For decades scientists have sought to generate clean energy by instigating the kind of sustained nuclear fusion reactions that power the sun.

It spends much of its time monitoring the light from around 60 of the nearest ultracool dwarf stars and brown dwarfs («stars» which are not quite massive enough to initiate sustained nuclear fusion in their cores), looking for evidence of planetary transits.

Not exact matches

With no nuclear fusion to sustain them, they collapse into Earth - size balls of tightly bound carbon and oxygen nuclei with an outer layer of hydrogen plasma (disrupted atoms).

Objects smaller than 13 Jupiter masses can not sustain any kind of nuclear fusion in their cores, so Zapatero Osorio and her colleagues believe they should be called planets.