Chandra Release - April 14, 2003

Visual Description: TWA 5B

A Chandra observation revealed X-rays produced by TWA 5B, a brown dwarf orbiting a young binary star system known as TWA 5A. The star system is 180 light years from the Earth and a member of a group of about a dozen young stars in the constellation Hydra. The brown dwarf orbits the binary star system at a distance about 2.75 times that of Pluto's orbit around the Sun.   The image shows two bright spots. One is much larger, the star system, labeled TWA 5A, and is located on the bottom. The other, the brown dwarf, is much smaller, and is labeled TWA 5B, positioned up top. The two sources are colored mostly white with red-orange rims and appear to almost touch.  The sizes of the sources in the image, however, are due to an instrumental effect that causes the spreading of pointlike sources.  Young brown dwarfs, like young stars, have turbulent interiors. When combined with rapid rotation, this turbulent motion can lead to a tangled magnetic field that can heat their upper atmospheres, or coronas, to a few million degrees Celsius. The X-rays from both TWA 5A and TWA 5B are from their hot coronas.