Discoveries point to a speed limit on how fast "failed stars" can rotate

• By learning more about these fast-moving brown dwarfs, researchers hope to figure out more about their evolution and formation.

What they found: A new study in the Astronomical Journal shows that the three brown dwarfs each rotate fully about once per hour despite being in very different environments.

• Researchers think that if these brown dwarfs rotated faster than this "speed limit," it might cause them to break apart.
• "It would be pretty spectacular to find a brown dwarf rotating so fast it is tossing its atmosphere out into space," Megan Tannock, an author of the new study, said in a NASA statement. 
• "But so far, we haven’t found such a thing. I think that must mean that either something is slowing the brown dwarfs down before they hit that extreme or that they can’t get that fast in the first place."

The intrigue: The new study also shows that old, out-of-service telescopes can find new life after death.

• The researchers used data collected by NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope, which was turned off in January 2020, to find the spin rates of the brown dwarfs and then followed up with ground-based telescopes to gather more information.