My personal theory is that the significant luminosity from accretion could compensate for lack of bolometric luminosity.

But if the disk chemistry is the same, and given that we know planets can form in disks around low-mass stars, are there planets forming around Cha 1107-7626 too?

8/8

Hydrocarbons have been seen in number of disks around low-mass stars and even some more massive brown dwarfs. But Cha 1107-7626 is smaller and less luminous than those. So it's puzzling how the disk chemistry remains so similar.

7/8

The other noteworthy thing is that we see clear evidence of hydrocarbons (methane at 7.7 microns and ethylene at 10.5 microns) in the MIRI portion of the spectrum. This is the smallest object with hydrocarbons detected in its disk!

6/8

Accretion rates are hard to understand even for more massive objects. We know there's a correlation with mass, but there's a ton of scatter for any given mass.

5/8

We calculated an accretion rate based on these lines, and this object is accreting way more than "typical" objects of its mass. We're not sure why.

4/8

Our object, Cha 1107-7626, is part of the Chameleon star forming region, which is why we have an estimate of its age of 1-3 Myr. And the accretion signatures were not a surprise. Prior published spectra also showed lots of emission from H-alpha and P-beta.

3/8

First, I want to thank my collaborators, particularly Victor Almendros-Abad who did a lot of great work for this paper.

2/8

I love the acronym. It meets my two criteria for a good acronym of being unique enough to search it on ADS and also being a real acronym.

My apologies if we aren't a major news org, but my colleague @ericboodman.bsky.social just wrote about this @statnews.com

If there's an angle we missed, feel free to reach out

www.statnews.com/2025/01/30/t...