Theorists were talking about them as early as the 1960’s, but
the first confirmed observation of a brown dwarf, an object
that’s more than a planet but not quite a star, didn’t come
until 1994. Since then, astronomers have been making up for lost
time, trying their best to understand these cosmic oddballs. Now
a team based at the University of Arizona has used not one but
two space telescopes to reveal something in a brown dwarf lying
30 light years from Earth that we usually think of as very much
a terrestrial phenomenon: weather patterns — including clouds
most likely made from particles of iron and sand. The dwarf in
question is named (believe it or not) 2MASS J22282889-431026,
and the observations, reported in Astrophysical Journal Letters,
show an atmosphere in no small amount of turmoil. That’s not
surprising: the planet Jupiter, the closest thing in our own
Solar System to a brown dwarf, has clouds of ammonia, water
vapor and various hydrocarbons, driven around the planet by
powerful winds and sucked i