What is the mystery light NASA’s telescope just picked up around this failed star?

Astronomers witnessed mysterious light around a failed star in an unexpected celestial discovery using NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope.

A group of astronomers witnessed infrared emissions from methane surrounding a brown dwarf, likely due to energy in its upper atmosphere and indicating it as an aurora akin to Earth's northern and southern lights, NASA announced Tuesday. But the problem is that there's no clear source for that energy.

"We expected to see methane because methane is all over these brown dwarfs," said Jackie Faherty, an astronomer at the American Museum of Natural History in New York who was awarded time to investigate 12 brown dwarfs using the JWST. "But instead of absorbing light, we saw just the opposite: The methane was glowing. My first thought was, what the heck? Why is methane emission coming out of t...