HomeSpace & AstronomyBrown Dwarf Classification Explorer

🪐 Brown Dwarf Classification Explorer

Interactive 3D star-formation scene where dialing an object's mass shows the boundary where it fails to sustain hydrogen fusion and settles into a cooling brown dwarf class.

Space & Astronomy3DModerate60 FPS
brown-dwarf-classification-lab ↗ Open standalone

Dial an object's mass and cooling age and watch it settle into a planet, a fading brown dwarf, or a true hydrogen-fusing star — with a scale bar against Jupiter and the Sun to show just how little its radius changes.

🔬 What It Demonstrates

Above ~80 Jupiter masses an object ignites stable hydrogen fusion and holds a steady temperature forever; below that line it can only briefly burn deuterium before cooling and drifting from a warm, dusty L dwarf down through T and Y spectral classes.

🎮 How to Use

Move the Mass and Age sliders (or jump to a preset) to see the object's color, core glow and spectral class update live. Toggle Cutaway core view to see whether the interior is fusing hydrogen, briefly fusing deuterium, or just cooling.

💡 Did You Know?

Because degeneracy pressure supports their interiors, brown dwarfs across a 6x mass range are all close to Jupiter's own radius — mass keeps piling up as density, not size.

⚙ Under the hood

Interactive 3D star-formation scene where dialing an object's mass shows the boundary where it fails to sustain hydrogen fusion and settles into a cooling brown dwarf class.

brown-dwarfsstellar-classificationsubstellar-objectsnuclear-fusionastrophysicsastronomy

3D · Three.js / WebGL renderer · 60 FPS target · runs fully client-side, no install

What did you find?

Add reproduction steps (optional)