Yahoo Answers is shutting down on May 4th, 2021 (Eastern Time) and the Yahoo Answers website is now in read-only mode. There will be no changes to other Yahoo properties or services, or your Yahoo account. You can find more information about the Yahoo Answers shutdown and how to download your data on this help page.

?
Lv 6

Could a spaceship land on a brown dwarf star with a temperature of -20 C?

7 Answers

Relevance
  • ?
    Lv 7
    5 years ago
    Favorite Answer

    Brown dwarfs aren't actually stars. They are essentially just large planets with masses below the threshold required for sustained nuclear fusion. Now, the most massive brown dwarfs happen to straddle this blurry boundary region between planet and star, and they *do*, if I remember correctly, undergo a few spattering fits of deuterium fusion, but they still never progress beyond what would be considered a protostar phase.

    You wouldn't be able to land on one in any case. They are gas giants, and any solid core would be buried under tens of thousands of miles of liquids and gasses under extreme pressures. You'd have better luck trying to land on Jupiter.

  • 5 years ago

    Brown dwarfs have surface temperatures of about 3000C, not to mention it's not a solid object and it's gravity would crush anything manmade, look at Jupiter, it's somewhat smaller than a brown dwarf yet still destroys all probes sent to it due to it's immense pressure of it's atmosphere

  • ?
    Lv 7
    5 years ago

    Landing isn't the term I would use as it implies that the pilot has some control over the vehicle. A brown dwarf has gravitational attraction that puts Jupiter's to shame. Then there are the magnetic fields to contend with. In addition the star is gaseous and has no solid surface.

  • 5 years ago

    Well, stars themselves don't really have solid surfaces; so, 'landing' would be like landing on a gas giant... In 1994, we sent a probe into Jupiter's atmosphere; it descended under a parachute, returning data for almost an hour before being crushed by the rising pressure of Jupiter's atmosphere... This would be similar.

  • ?
    Lv 7
    5 years ago

    No. Brown dwarfs have no solid surface to land on. A space ship could fly through the outer most layers of the atmosphere, but the gravity and magnetic fields would be a b*tch to deal with.

  • 5 years ago

    No, think of a brown dwarf as a gas giant, like Jupiter. If we were able to find some solid mass to land a ship on it would be so deep down in the bowls of the "star" that the pressure of the gasses above the ship would crush it.

  • ?
    Lv 7
    5 years ago

    NO.

    Why? Gravity.

Still have questions? Get your answers by asking now.