A new alien planet-hunting tool has found no trace of a brown dwarf more than 100 light-years from E

A new alien planet-hunting tool has found no trace of a brown dwarf more than 100 light-years from Earth, despite evidence that the misfit failed star is eclipsing its partner, a team of puzzled astronomers says. European Southern Observatory’s (ESO) new SPHERE (Spectro-Polarimetric High-contrast Exoplanet Research) on the Very Large Telescope didn’t find a sign of a brown dwarf — sometimes called a “failed star” — near the double star V471 Tauri, despite the fact that scientists were pretty sure they would find one. The scientists used the ESO observations to create a video zoom-in on the strange star system.