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baseketball t1_jcky1u0 wrote

Here's a paper on habitability around brown dwarf stars:

https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.3847/1538-4357/ab5b13

It does say that brown dwarfs cool much faster than our sun, so I think your story's premise is plausible. The paper assumes you need at least 1 billion years for life to evolve so the mass of the star must be at least 20 Jupiter masses or it'll cool too fast to remain in the habitable zone. It further limits the minimum mass based on requirements for photosynthesis and UV output.

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ElderOldDog t1_jclj20g wrote

Having been made curious about 'brown dwarfs' (aka 'short Lamanites [you have to be mormon to get it...]), I asked Google and found one interesting item that I hope you haven't overlooked:  All the brown dwarf stars found to date are in binary systems.

But I found nothing regarding the possibility of the binary system having two brown dwarfs...

If you need a non-judgmental 'early reader,' feel free to reach out to me, a 78-year-old literate Sci/fi fanatic.

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superbob201 t1_jcmh3x3 wrote

The reason that brown dwarfs are found in binary systems is probably because they are too faint to see on their own. It was only fairly recently that we could rule out Nemesis, which was a hypothetical brown dwarf star orbiting around Sol.

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mfb- t1_jcoa260 wrote

To cool relative to a situation without the brown dwarf? No. Its infrared radiation will be far more intense than the radiation the orbiting object receives from deep space.

To cool relative to some other reference?

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