They also generate heat through gravitational contraction, and some, near the tippy top of the mass scale, also fuse lithium. But all these processes are fleeting, leaving brown dwarfs relatively inert.
Still, nearly three decades after that initial discovery, there's much that we don't know about brown dwarfs. There's still an aura of mystery about them-in one case that was announced at the AAS meeting, a quite literal aura.
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