[delta_p_delta_x]

Worth noting that the artist's impression is... not accurate. Both CD-35 2722 b (the brown dwarf orbiting the primary star) and CD-35 2722 b I (the exomoon orbiting the secondary) should be much closer in size. It is estimated that Jupiter is essentially the largest any gas giant can get; adding more mass will simply increase density and interior temperature until deuterium and lithium fusion and brown dwarfdom, and then at around 80 Jupiter masses, protium fusion and stardom.

Look at Barnard's Star[1], which is actually a fusing red dwarf star: it is not much bigger than Jupiter.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barnard%27s_Star

[pfdietz]

One thing this implies is that the escape velocity of such objects increases linearly with mass, so the surface temperature they can sustain without losing mass increases quadratically with their mass. Massive super-jovian planets can orbit close to their star, limited only by tidal disruption. Some could even orbit within the outer envelope of the star for quite some time.

[pfdietz]

Ugh I got that wrong. Escape energy increases linearly with mass, so the temperature goes up linearly as well.

[ck2]

NASA exoplanet catalog has a neat system/star view

* https://science.nasa.gov/exoplanet-catalog/cd-35-2722-b/

[nkrisc]

It’s a perspective rendering, not orthographic. I don’t think you can reliably judge relative volume based on this image.

[PaulHoule]

Nice charts in this paper that support this thesis

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC6525489/

[F3nd0]

I kind of assumed the artist’s impression was working with perspective? The images shown in the sidebar seem to picture them at different relative sizes.

[NooneAtAll3]

they are close in size

it's just that one is farther away from the camera

[hparadiz]

If a brown dwarf is right on the edge of stardom would it start protium fusion in only the part of itself that is the right pressure and then slowly burn out or would that ignition precipitate a pressure wave through the entire body forcing fusion to begin everywhere?

[vikingerik]

The other reply gave good info, but didn't quite answer this. Once an object's core acquires enough temperature/pressure/density to start protium fusion, it will continue, not burn out. The fusion itself increases the temperature, and the produced helium is denser than hydrogen, so the core compresses more under gravity thus increasing the pressure too. So protium fusion creates its own conditions to continue, so there's no such thing as borderline stardom; once protium fusion starts at all, it will continue and it's now a red dwarf. Fusion doesn't begin or occur everywhere, it's still only at the core, but convection will eventually (10^12 year timescale) cause all the hydrogen to have moved through the fusing region.

[delta_p_delta_x]

Thanks; this is much more concise than I could manage.

I think the key idea is fixed minimum/maximum boundaries for a lot of astrophysical phenomena—stellar protium fusion, the Chandrasekhar limit, Tolman–Oppenheimer–Volkoff limit, etc.

[ctippett]

I appreciated both yours and the parent's comment. I read the shorter answer first, which was accessible enough to a layman like me that I was left wanting more, which made reading your comment immediately after all the more satisfying.

[hparadiz]

It should have been obvious to me (fusion duh!) that the result of the fusion is a higher density material that then increases the conditions for the reaction to take place. Both comments were immensely helpful and interesting! Thank you.

[delta_p_delta_x]

There's really a lot to unpack here. (I rewrote this response thrice...) To spoil the answers straight away, and perhaps to address some misconceptions upfront:

> If a brown dwarf is right on the edge of stardom would it start protium fusion in only the part of itself that is the right pressure

The nuclear cross-section of protium fusion in astronomical bodies is determined by temperature, pressure, and density. These variables are in turn dictated by the total mass of the object in question. Brown dwarfs never have sufficient mass for protium fusion, so they never undergo any protium fusion whatsoever. This is a hard-and-fast boundary for stardom.

> or would that ignition precipitate a pressure wave through the entire body forcing fusion to begin everywhere

The three variables above are not uniformly distributed throughout the body; there is a maximum at the centre, and fusion only happens here. Even in the Sun, about 99% of the fusion happens within about a quarter of the radius from the centre. The temperature drops rapidly thereafter, reducing the nuclear cross-section of the proton-proton chain to essentially zero. At the photosphere (surface), the temperature is ~5777 K, which is a decidedly Earthly temperature (lightning bolts are ~ 30000 K). So no, fusion does not happen everywhere.

Now, we need to discuss star formation and why brown dwarfs have never experienced protium fusion at any time in their lives. Star formation is still a very active area of research, debate, and fitting models to empirical study, and this is especially true for the detailed interior and structure of protostars and pre-main-sequence stars; hence, this is going to be quite surface-level (pun not intended).

Collapsing molecular clouds form stars. The total mass of a given cloud (or a particular region of it) sets an upper bound on the resultant object, because the total mass dictates the gravitational potential energy and hence the terminal velocity of the matter, and hence the rate of matter infall at the centre before the cloud dissipates. If the mass is low enough, the central object will become a brown dwarf, or even a large gas giant and a 'rogue planet'.

As the gas cloud collapses, the central region increases in density, temperature, and pressure, but no fusion occurs yet. Conservation of angular momentum forms a circumstellar disc, and material continues to fall onto the central region. As long as this infall continues, the central region is called a protostar. At some point the mass of protostar crosses the boundary needed for deuterium fusion; if the infall stops here, the result is a brown dwarf. If this infall continues, the mass increases beyond the boundary (~80 Jupiter masses) needed for protium fusion, and protium fusion can begin. When the infall stops and the circumstellar disc largely dissipates, the result is a pre-main-sequence star.

Note that both these very young pre-stellar objects are not yet at hydrostatic equilibrium, and are still comparatively rarefied (or 'puffy') compared to main-sequence stars; they are still collapsing, and the temperature, density, and pressure at their cores continues to increase. Only when this equilibrium is achieved and gravitational collapse is halted do stars begin life on the main sequence.

Now, it should be evident why brown dwarfs never experience protium fusion: at no point in their lives have they ever had any region in their interior hot, dense, or hyperbaric enough to have a high enough nuclear cross-section for protium fusion. At their formations, they were simply not massive enough; they continue to collapse, which admittedly provides a considerable power output—surface temperatures are ~1000 K. The largest brown dwarfs experience deuterium/tritium/lithium fusion into helium, but this also stops over time.

(Side note: in my opinion the word 'brown dwarf' is a bit of a misnomer, because look at how bright molten iron (~ 1500 K) is even in broad daylight[1]; now imagine an object ten to twenty times the radius of Earth, emitting this much heat from every square millimetre. If you approached a 'new' brown dwarf it would cast a lot of light.)

[1]: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Scunthorpe_Molten_St...

[walrus01]

> It is estimated that Jupiter is essentially the largest any gas giant can get

That does not appear to be the case if we mean mass, not diameter.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Super-Jupiter

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CoRoT-3b

[delta_p_delta_x]

Yes; I was under the impression that from context it was clear what I was talking about. In astrophysics, to avoid precisely this confusion, the convention is to use the adjective 'massive' when comparing, well, masses, and 'largest'/'smallest' for the dimension of length and its higher powers (radius/diameter/area/volume). For instance:

> the Sun is 3.33e5 as massive as Earth.

[Foskya]

But... he literally said in the following sentence that adding more mass does not change size, implying that he is talking about diameter, not mass.

[walrus01]

Correct, but the link for "super jupiter" also goes to something that astronomers are fairly sure is 1.38x the diameter of Jupiter. Much less massive of course. Meaning Jupiter's diameter is not an absolute hard limit nothing can be larger than.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HAT-P-1b

It also orbits its star in only under 5 days, so a few theoretical visualization/renderings of it would probably be quite spectacular.

[nullsanity]

Nobody said it was, he said it was "pretty much". Y'all can't read anymore.

[LearnYouALisp]

I mean, 40% is nearly 2x the projected area, anyway

[lucideer]

Who uses the word size to mean mass? The typical colloquial analogue to mass is "weight" - which nobody would ever conflate with "size".