100 light years from Earth sits a brown dwarf | Amelia Gibbon & Michael Cushing | TEDxToledo

Michael Cushing was part of a A University of Toledo astronomy team that found what researchers have identified as a new and very young object in space.

The free-floating, planetary-mass object he helped pinpoint is considered, in space terms, downright youthful. The brown dwarf is about 10 million years old. Amelia Gibbon is the executive director at the Friendly Center, which has been serving North Toledo (Ohio) since 1923. The purpose statement for the Friendly Center is: No neighbor will go hungry, feel alienated, alone or powerless.

Michael is an Associate Professor in the Department of Physics and Astronomy and the director of the Ritter Planetarium at the University of Toledo. His research focuses on the discovery and characterization of low-mass stars and brown dwarfs in the solar neighborhood using ground- and spaced-based telescopes and the development of the algorithms to both reduce and analyze these data. His research is supported by NASA and the NSF. This talk was given at a TEDx event using the TED conference format but independently organized by a local community. Learn more at https://www.ted.com/tedx