A 2024 Nature paper by Jerry Xuan et al. identified one of these objects as a close binary; that first one of these objects to be spectroscopically confirmed was discovered by a team including Shrinivas Kulkarni and Rebecca Oppenheimer. The top-left corner of a mass-period plot, known as their “desert,” contains unexpectedly few of these objects. A strong 2-micron methane absorption band, as observed by the 2MASS survey, is exemplified by Gliese 229B, the prototypical example of the T spectral type. These degenerate objects are spectroscopically distinguished from M stars by the presence of lithium. These objects can fuse deuterium despite being lighter than the 0.08 solar masses required to initiate p-p chain fusion. The very bottom right of the H–R diagram contains, for 10 points, what substellar objects, often called “failed stars”? ■END■
ANSWER: brown dwarf stars [or brown dwarfs; accept brown dwarf desert or methane brown dwarfs; prompt on dwarf stars; prompt on failed stars or stars until read]
<Other Science>
= Average correct buzz position