We'll talk about how astronomers discovered nearby brown dwarfs with the help of NASA's James Webb Space Telescope. Brown dwarfs present a clear difference between planets and stars, which calls into question all our theories about them. Many astronomers will use Webb to take a closer look at star formation and exoplanet atmospheres, because brown dwarfs fall in between. The old Hubble, Spitzer and ALMA telescopes have shown that brown dwarfs can be up to 70 times larger than gas planets like Jupiter, but they don't have enough mass for their cores to burn fuel and produce of light. Although brown dwarfs were theorized in 1995, there is no explanation for how they form. Like a star or like a planet? Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on “Why Violent Video Games Should Not Be Banned”? Get the original essay Scientists think it falls somewhere in between. Some brown dwarfs live near other stars and others drift alone. Brown dwarfs are small, dark and gaseous. At the University of Montreal, Étienne Artigau leads a team that uses Webb to study a brown dwarf called SIMP0136. It is one of the closest stars to our Sun, making it easier to study. It has many of the features of a planet without being too blinding like starlight. SIMP0136 was the same brown dwarf they used for another scientific discovery his team made a while ago, when they discovered they had a cloudy atmosphere. They're going to use Webb to find out what's in the clouds. Additionally, Webb has probe features, such as water absorption, that are inaccessible from the ground at this level of precision,” Artigau said. This is why they need webs in space, outside our atmosphere. These functions could potentially tell us which bodies in space could support life. All of these are techniques known as transit spectroscopy. SIMP0136 has a temperature similar to that of the other planets which will be studied in transit spectroscopy with Webb. The search for isolated low-mass brown dwarfs was one of the first scientific goals set for the Webb telescope in the 1990s, said astronomer Aleks Scholz of the University of St. Andrews. Brown dwarfs have lower mass than stars and low luminosity, so they are best visible in infrared light, which is why they need Webb for this research. Some brown dwarfs are not much heavier than Jupiter. It has been difficult for astronomers to find brown dwarfs with masses less than five times the mass of Jupiter, the mass where star and planet formation merge. That's why they need the Webb telescope, because it can do things that other telescopes can't do..