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Brown Dwarfs

Failed stars: too heavy to be planets, too light to burn hydrogen.

Past about 13 Jupiter masses a ball of hydrogen gets hot enough in its core to fuse deuterium, and it stops being a planet at all. It is not a star either: that needs roughly 75 Jupiters, the mass at which ordinary hydrogen ignites. In between sits the brown dwarf, glowing on deuterium and the heat of its own contraction, cooling slowly over billions of years from dull red through magenta to barely visible. Strangely, piling on mass barely changes its size, because degeneracy pressure holds it near Jupiter's radius no matter how heavy it gets. Build one by pushing the mass slider past 13 Jupiters on a hydrogen-helium recipe.

Bron
Bron
Brown DwarfHabitability 0
Aug 11, 2026
Brown Dwarf System
Brown Dwarf System
Brown DwarfHabitability 0
Aug 11, 2026
Marituzna
Marituzna
Brown DwarfHabitability 0
Aug 11, 2026
Shralius
Shralius
Brown DwarfHabitability 0
Aug 11, 2026

See all brown dwarfs on Explore →

Surface views from three worlds: rocky ground under a ringed sky, a cloud deck, and a lit desert

New: Stand on Your World 🏔️

Every planet you build can now be seen from the ground. The terrain, the color of the sky, the weather and what hangs overhead are all read from the same numbers that shape the globe — so a thin-aired world gives you sunlit rock under a near-black sky crowded with stars, a runaway greenhouse seals you under an unbroken sulfur lid, and a gas giant leaves you in the cloud tops with nothing solid beneath you at all. If one of your moons wandered inside the Roche limit, what is left of it arcs overhead as rings.

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We only keep your email and the username you choose. We never share or sell your email, and we don't send marketing — we use it only to email you a sign-in code. Learn more.

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