[sulam]

I thought I read somewhere that many of these little red dots are turning out to be nothing more than bog-standard brown dwarfs in our own galaxy that are confusing the signal. These days we have some pretty powerful agents who can read these things faster than I can, so I went and found the paper: https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.04004

It turns out that brown dwarfs are actually corrected for, so my remembrance is correct but factored in. I’m posting anyway because 1) it’s interesting and mildly relevant and 2) others might have the same “vague but unclear” recollection I had and appreciate the elaboration.

[JumpCrisscross]

> many of these little red dots are turning out to be nothing more than bog-standard brown dwarfs

Your own paper estimates 5 to 25% may be brown dwarfs, and says nothing about whether they might be in our galaxy or not.

[fractaled]

Pretty sure we can't resolve brown dwarfs farther than a few 10k ly (well inside the confines of our galaxy).

[switchbak]

That’s valuable: I thought the whole thing was dismissed based on the brown dwarf explanation, this is interesting that that’s not the case.

It’s hard to keep up with all the news, particularly so given all the slop floating around. YouTube in particular seems to have a bunch of AI channels that just talk about this endlessly.