The NH3 absorption starting circa 2027 is going to be a wild ride.

Nevermind, turns out I just can't count after writing proposals all week. Only 2200 on my end

I've seen over 2500 👀

Brown dwarfs are macroscopic quantum objects - Nobel prize for you in a couple decades!

Can you argue that brown dwarfs are condensed matter?

Congratulations Doctor!!!!!

There's a lot to unpack from the paper; the main takeaway is that we're starting to really see these objects in 3D! In the future, we want to really look at how the atmosphere itself evolves over time, rather than just looking at the rotational modulation - this would really be the weather!

This is very similar to the atmosphere of Jupiter, which can be warmed by its aurora: electrons and charged particles impact the upper atmosphere and deposit energy, heating it up. From radio observations, we know SIMP-0136 hosts a powerful aurora, so it was exciting to confirm its effects with JWST

We were also surprised to see a temperature inversion in the atmosphere. For an isolated brown dwarf, we normally would expect the atmosphere to cool as the altitude increases. Instead, we found that it got warmer at about a millibar in pressure.

With these retrievals, we were able to directly measure small changes in the temperature, chemistry, and clouds. While before we often thought that the variability would be due to looking at more- or less patchy regions of cloud coverage, now we find that it's more due to changes in the temperature!

We used JWST to observe one full rotation each with NIRSpec/PRISM and MIRI/LRS (this is the same data as in the paper from @alliemccarthy.bsky.social earlier this year). This time however, we used atmospheric retrievals to measure how the different properties change as SIMP-0136 rotates.

The full article is now available here. It's been a big team effort, with the help of @johannavos.bsky.social, Merle Schrader, @maddielam.bsky.social, @astrotoole.bsky.social, and all the rest of my coauthors.

www.aanda.org/articles/aa/...