'While we have long been able to directly probe the winds of the bodies in our own solar system, we've had to conjecture what they're like in other kinds of bodies,' researcher Peter Williams said.
"This new technique opens the way to better understanding the behavior of atmospheres that are unlike anything found in our solar system," he said.
"In order to attempt our measurement, we needed to study a brown dwarf that had two special characteristics: it needed to have measurable variability at the infrared wavelengths, and it needed to be a known emitter of radio pulses.
"Brown dwarfs have atmospheres but they're pretty different than Earth's—they can be completely covered in clouds made out of several different chemicals, not just water," Williams told."Even though brown dwarfs are too far away for us to pick out individual clouds when we observe them, we can still measure how long it takes a group of clouds to do a lap around the atmosphere, on average.
These winds whip around the brown dwarf"eastward," meaning that the atmosphere is rotating faster than the interior—just like Jupiter—according to the researchers. This finding is consistent with most of the theories of brown dwarfs that scientists haven't been able to confirm until now.
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