Press Releases 2006

ESO PR Photo 28a/06

Two Planet-Size Dwarfs (Artist's View)

[Preview - JPEG: 650 x 400 pix - 218k]
[Normal - JPEG: 1300 x 800 pix - 667k]
[HiRes - JPEG: 3072 x 1890 pix - 2M]
[HiRes - TIFF: 3072 x 1890 pix - 17M]

Artist's impression of the newly discovered system: a brown dwarf circles a white dwarf in a little less than two hours.

ESO PR Photo 28b/06

Brown Dwarf Swallowed by Red Giant

[Preview - JPEG: 484 x 400 pix - 205k]
[Normal - JPEG: 967 x 800 pix - 579k]
[HiRes - JPEG: 2048 x 2476 pix - 2M]
[HiRes - TIFF: 2048 x 2476 pix - 15M]

PR Video 28/06

Brown Dwarf Swallowed by Red Giant

Computer simulation of the merger process of a Red Giant with a Brown Dwarf that leads to the white dwarf/brown dwarf binary system containing WD0137-349. The simulation was done by Los Alamos National Laboratory's members Steven Diehl, Chris Fryer, Falk Herwig, and Gabriel Rockefeller. The image shows four snapshots of the merger at different time, extracted from the movie available in AVI format. The physical size of the frames is a 300x300 solar radii box centered at the position of the red giant core, the white dwarf to be. The color depicts density. The in-spiraling brown dwarf is shown as a black dot. In the movie each frame corresponds to.25days in real evolution, showing a total of 177days or 2.5 original orbits in evolution. During this short time, the brown dwarf already spirals from the surface down to less than 5 solar radii.