A team of researchers from two collaborations, KMTNet and the OGLE, or Optical Gravitational Lensing Experiment, announced their new planet-brown dwarf pair, calling it the “OGLE-2017-BLG-1522 microlensing event.” Brown dwarfs are either the lightest, dimmest stars or the heaviest, hottest planets. "Planet formation scenarios combined with the small companion-host mass ratio q ∼ 0.016 and separation suggest that the companion could be the first discovery of a giant planet that formed in a protoplanetary disk around a brown dwarf host," the scientists concluded. Unlike stars, planets don’t naturally give off any light, which means that scientists have to get a little creative when looking for them. As you might imagine, there are questions regarding when a super-planet (a planet of greater than Jupiter mass) gathers enough material to qualify as a brown dwarf. How something forms is of crucial importance to understanding whether something is a planet or not, since planets tend to form from disks around stars, while stars form from the centers of the disks themselves.
ArXiv publishes research that a gas giant may be orbiting a brown dwarf. The exoplanet, designated OGLE-2017-BLG-1522Lb, orbits its host at a distance of 0.59 AU and could be the first known gas giant to have formed inside the protoplanetary disk of a brown dwarf.