Habitability in Brown Dwarf Systems

TL;DR

This paper explores the potential habitability of planets orbiting brown dwarfs, emphasizing their unique system configurations and the importance of future atmospheric studies with telescopes like JWST.

Contribution

It highlights the significance of brown dwarf planetary systems and discusses their potential for habitability and atmospheric characterization, a relatively unexplored area.

Findings

Brown dwarf systems can host planets in habitable zones.

These planets are accessible for atmospheric studies with upcoming telescopes.

The system architectures resemble Jupiter's moons, offering unique habitability insights.

Abstract

The very recent discovery of planets orbiting very low mass stars sheds light on these exotic objects. Planetary systems around low-mass stars and brown dwarfs are very different from our solar system: the planets are expected to be much closer than Mercury, in a layout that could resemble the system of Jupiter and its moons. The recent discoveries point in that direction with, for example, the system of Kepler-42 and especially the system of TRAPPIST-1 which has seven planets in a configuration very close to the moons of Jupiter. Low-mass stars and brown dwarfs are thought to be very common in our neighborhood and are thought to host many planetary systems. The planets orbiting in the habitable zone of brown dwarfs (and very low-mass stars) represent one of the next challenges of the following decades: they are the only planets of the habitable zone whose atmosphere we will be able to probe (e.g. with the JWST).