Re: Planet X: Cannot be a Brown Dwarf

In Article <20010831191614.01372.00002746@nso-fj.aol.com> a poster wrote:
> Brown dwarf is a dim heavenly object that has more mass than
> a planet but less mass than a star. Brown dwarfs are about the
> same size as the planet Jupiter, but they have about 10 to 75
> times more mass than Jupiter. Mass is the amount of matter in
> an object.

Brown dwarf's that have been located and documented by man, that is.
Until 1995, only one (1) observed?  My my, we have definitions based on
ONE (1) observation?

Sky Survey Scientists Discover New Celestial Dwarfs
Sloan Digital SkySurvey, May 31, 1999

    Scientists of the Sloan Digital Sky Survey announced today
    (May 31) that early data from the Survey have revealed a new
    type of astronomical object, smaller than a star but larger than
    a planet. Until now, only ONE such object had ever been
    detected in the universe. Early this spring, while searching Sky
    Survey data for unusual objects such as the universe's most
    distant quasars, graduate student Xiaohui Fan and astronomer
    Michael Strauss, of Princeton University, found a faint but
    extremely red dot of light in the night sky. Subsequent
    spectroscopic observations revealed that the object was not a
    distant quasar but instead an equally fascinating find - a nearby
    cool, brown dwarf with properties between those of a planet and
    a star. Until their discovery, only one of this type of "cool
    substellar object," known as Gliese 229B, discovered in 1995,
    had ever been observed.

If they didn't have X mass, and burn with X intensity, they would not
have been registered. Things have changed, recently. We keep finding the
little ones ... the more we look, the smaller and dimmer they get!

Counting Brown Dwarfs
Earth Changes TV, August 25, 2000

    Considered an astronomical oddity only a few years ago,
    brown dwarfs are intriguing objects that, unlike stars, are
    too low in mass to burn hydrogen, but are more massive
    than planets. At 15 to 80 times the mass of Jupiter, the
    light that they emit is so faint it's hard to tell how many of
    them are scattered throughout the galaxy, and how they're
    formed. The Hubble census finds that, like stars, there are
    more low-mass brown dwarfs than high-mass ones, and
    this trend continues down to low, nearly "planetary" masses.