So I was putting together my notes today for this episode, which is all about

Brown dwarfs, by the way.

And I was reading journal articles and news stories, all the usual stuff to make an

episode.

And one word kept popping into my mind over and over and over and over again.

That word is weird.

Brown dwarfs are just weird.

The short version of brown dwarfs, and we're about to get into the long version, trust me.

The short version is they're too big to be a planet, but too small to be a star. And you might think

that such a thing wouldn't even exist. That's like the first weird thing, is that brown dwarfs

are a category unto themselves. You might think you have planets over here and you have

stars over there. And if you start making a planet bigger, you would just have a large planet.

And at some point, surprise, instead of a planet, you have a star. You just have a small star and

then you go up to start building big stars. But no.

Sadly, nature is much more complicated than we would prefer, or maybe we do prefer it because then we get to keep having jobs as astrophysicist.

But either way, brown dwarfs are indeed a thing all on their own.

And not only are they their own identity, their own class of astronomical

object, they have their own subclassifications because, man, just one category just isn't

confusing enough. So we need to admit it. We need to get out front. We might argue about the

nature of brown dwarfs. we might try to lump them in

as planets or lump them in as stars but they're not there neither they aren't going away and they

are weird in this weirdness this weird nature of brown dwarfs comes from a question. A couple questions. We have these things,

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