It's entirely possible that I'm a big pervo but, doesn't the last sentence contain the word dick? What is a "dick of dust and gas"?

That's what my wife's pet name for me Jake.

for the potential Google-hits for "brown star."

Are you really sure you want to attract that demographic? I mean, isn't one compos mentis enough?

So does this mean that Wonkette will suddenly get hot for astronomy?

A body needs to be a minimum of about five Jupiter masses before it can be classed as a brown dwarf.

I'm fairly sure that if the person writing the article had had something better than a public school education, he would have spelled "disc" right. Maybe even spelled it as "disk." Unfortunately, I guess he got confused and flustered and couldn't decide between the two... so he combined them, leaving out the "s."

brown stars? dicks of dust?

In this version of the story, it's spelled correctly.

Trying to decide if Jupiter is a "failed star" is not easy since it's a continuum, not a stairstep (or starstep). It's like trying to decide if Pluto or Ceres are planets.

What are usually considered brown dwarfs are much larger than Jupiter, large enough so that they originally glowed quite brightly when they formed, due to the heat of collapse. But they're too small to have enough pressure in their cores to produce fusion, so they never ignite.

According to this page it requires a body 84 times the mass of Jupiter to ignite. (The sun is 1000 times the mass of Jupiter.) That same page says that the generally accepted definition of "Brown Dwarf" has a lower limit of about ten times the mass of Jupiter.

Dick, disk, disc...

Just again demonstrates what all of those multiple layers of fact checking are able to achieve.

After reading the article I closely read Ace's post to see if he would mention the last sentence. Evidently, he didn't finish the article or thought he would be above the fray and not mention it at all.

Do brown stars accrete or excrete?

Astronomical cladistics has gotten a lot more complicated in the last couple of decades. It used to be that you could put astronomical objects in neat categories: comets, asteroids, moons, planets, stars.

But then Voyager took some high-def photos of the Jovian system, and things got weird. Is a big moon a planet? Is a small one an asteroid? What if planets actually capture asteroids (as Mars probably did Deimos and Phobos)? Are they still asteroids or are they moons? Or both? And what about comets that "melt" into asteroids? Or those strange "Kuiper belt objects" that might be as large as Jupiter? Then you have weird things like "neutron stars" and "quasars" and black holes and dark matter and gravitational lenses and....

This is a cool time to be alive, if you're a space geek.

"Like the Duck himself, I guess."

"The Duke"

"Duck, I sez"

"... birth ... surrounded by ... a dick ... and gas...."

Just another failed, oppressive patriarchal system from what I can tell.

Excerpted from my new book Is Space Necessary?

Keep your disk away from my brown star. My roamin' days are over.

Sounds like quite a large brown dick, drawf or no.

This is a cool time to be alive, if you're a space geek.

True, but unfortunately, some of the coolness will be lost in the sea of phallus jokes.

Not sure about a dick of dust, but I do remember the pain and anguish of being forced to play football with a bulging dick.

I don't get it. What's the joke here?
Is Brown Star another name for the Amber Eye, hence the Wonkette reference?

Well, I sent it to Ace as an example of the fine, multi-level editing and proofreading we have here in Dallas. I'm a relative newbie to the AoS lifestyle (I'm up to diet cherry Coke and Zoloft, so I'm gettin' there!) and I thought it might be something everyone might be interested in...

Dick........disk.........disc
Brown star..........amber eye............balloon knot
It's all an anal orgy!

> Is Brown Star another name for the Amber Eye, hence the Wonkette reference?

Yes sir. I'd never encountered the term myself until GTA: San Andreas featured a seafood restaurant called "The Brown Starfish."

I don't get it.

Oh, I think you do, Bart. I think you do, indeed.

That must be the biggest dick ever.

Yea, I got it but I needed a set-up for the "amber eye."

Can't just spring an amber eye on somebody. One must ease into the amber eye, gently, softly.

I take my writing very seriously, you know.

What?

What did you think I was talking?

Oh.
You're sick.

IIRC the sequel to 2001 [2010] had the obelisk thing appearing on Jupiter and multiplying, increasing Jupiter's mass and turning it into a star. A small star, but a star - thus allowing life on its moons to evolve/begin.

It's been years since I read that.

I don't know if Jupiter is technically a "brown star," but Carl Sagan referred to it as "a star that failed." If only it could have gotten a little bit bigger and maybe pulled in some of Saturn's mass into it... we could have two suns, just like Luke Skywalker did on Tatooine. And how freakin' cool would that be?

It wouldn't be cool at all... it would be freakin' HOT!!!

How many light years is it to ALPHA CENTARY? becuase the JUPITER 2 never made it

I always thought the official classification for Jupiter was as a Gaseous Giant, but I could be thinking Ted Kennedy.