Oppenheimer, B. R., et al. A possible mechanism could be a close interacting brown dwarf binary. Gl 570D, a new T dwarf companion Discovered as a field object, it shares common proper motion with the Gl 570ABC triple. Nakajima, T., et al. Burgasser, A. J., et al.
Photometric errors are in parentheses.
The search for substellar objects, or brown dwarfs, has been progressing in earnest since 1963, when Kumar first calculated the limiting mass at which stars fuse Hydrogen in their cores. This is the process that allows stars to remain steadily luminious over their lifetimes, as gravitational contraction is balanced by fusion-generated thermal pressure. Brown dwarfs form just like stars, contracting from dense molecular clouds, sometimes in tandem with a more massive star. Nonetheless, it is their final formation mass that condemns these low mass objects to forever be brown dwarfs. Lithium is fully depleted in cool objects more massive than 65 M J because of their convective mixing.