First paragraph:

> The star is being orbited by a brown dwarf, an object too massive to be a planet but too small to be a star.

>According to the IAU working definition (from August 2018) an exoplanet can orbit a brown dwarf. It requires a mass below 13 MJ and a mass ratio of M/Mcentral<2/(25+√{621}), or roughly 1/25. This means that an object with a mass up to 3.2 MJ around a brown dwarf with a mass of 80 MJ is considered a planet. It also means that an object with a mass up to 0.52 MJ around a brown dwarf with a mass of 13 MJ is considered a planet

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There are three clear benefits.

1. Answering where humans come from is probably one of the the oldest question we have had. All religions try to answer this in one way or the other. I say, trying to come up with scientific answers is extremely valuable.

2. We feel awe at the wonders of nature, not much different from the awe that we feel when we see great human art. Tax dollars as well as charity are used to subsidize art often. This is similar, though there is more money involved here.

3. The problems one sees in different domains are always different. Funding agencies give money to the "directly economically useless domains" because the workforce that is trained and technology that is developed can then be applied to the "directly economically useful domains". The support money to the former is much smaller than the support money to the latter, but just enough to inject fresh ideas and creativity to the latter.

Digital cameras for humanity as a whole, and satellite based telescopes for maintaining US dominance for the last 50 years and the long peace. Knowledge is power.

Before the late 70s satellites used film that was dropped back from orbit to the ground and developed to identify Cold War troop movements.

No, but let's keep pouring billions into confirming that the laws of physics apply outside of our solar system - smaller objects orbiting larger ones? Who could have guessed?

I'm sympathetic to space colonization, which seems like the most optimistic long term future for humanity, but the focus on exoplanets, -moons, even signs of exo-civilizations feels like making up theories about the bottom of the ocean centuries before the invention of submarines.

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