NASA's powerful new James Webb Space
slot Telescope continues to take a closer, more detailed look at corners of the universe, and so far some of the results are just weird. Like the brown dwarf where the atmosphere appears to be filled with clouds of hot sand.
A brown dwarf is an object with a mass between a giant planet like Jupiter and a very small star. This particular one is called VHS 1256b, it's 72 light-years away and almost 20 times more massive than Jupiter. Most brown dwarfs have characteristics of both stars and planets -- they give off some heat and light like a star but are cooling and often form atmospheres more like that of a planet.
If you're picturing a world where a planetary dust storm kicks up planetwide clouds filled with fine grains from the beach or the desert, it's actually more bizarre than that. Toasty sand clouds are probably the product of the planet being hot enough to vaporize some of the minerals that form rocks, and those silicate materials then swirl around the atmosphere.
