Brown dwarfs
Substellar objects between ~13 and ~80 Jupiter masses — too massive for white-dwarf-style stellar evolution but not massive enough for sustained hydrogen fusion. Sit just above the planetary-mass boundary that exoplanet entities like wd-0806b straddle.
Relevance to the vault
- Methodological neighbor to cold-giant exoplanet atmosphere retrievals: T- and Y-dwarf atmosphere models inform interpretations of cold directly imaged planets.
- The 2026 ben-lew et al. JWST wd-0806b paper (see src-aas-nova-wd-0806b-atmosphere-2026-04) leverages brown-dwarf retrieval techniques and extends them with altitude-dependent K_zz — applicable to cool brown dwarfs as well as cold-giant exoplanets.