Using @LOFAR we have recently made a new discovery - we have directly found a brown dwarf using a radio telescope! https://twitter.com/LOFAR/status/1325757248195469312

We have nicknamed the brown dwarf Elegast - after the sly and stealthy elf-king from Dutch folklore (because the brown dwarf was tough to find!)

So what is a brown dwarf? These are cosmic objects that are about 20 more massive than Jupiter. They are no where near massive enough to be stars like our Sun, showing more similarities to our Gas Giant planets than to stars.

Why is this discovery important? Because we can use the radio waves we have detected to directly probe the magnetic field of the brown dwarf and, by inference, exoplanets. This is important to understanding whether any of the objects could be habitable around other stars!

You can read the paper here: https://arxiv.org/abs/2010.01915