JWST has spotted sandy clouds on a distant alien world

Brown dwarfs are too massive to be a planet but not large enough to be a star, giving them features of both. Now, astronomers using the James Webb Space Telescope have found clouds on one of these cosmic objects

By Alex Wilkins

The James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) has found direct evidence of clouds made from sand-like substances on a distant world.

Brown dwarfs are large balls of gas, more massive than planets but without enough mass and pressure from gravity to start nuclear fusion like stars, giving them a dull glow in mostly the infrared range. To date, all our observations of these failed stars had been in a narrow wavelength of light, limiting our understanding of their chemical composition. …