Astronomers have used the National Science Foundation’s Karl G. Jansky Very Large Array (VLA) and NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope to make the first measurement of wind speed on a brown dwarf—an object intermediate in mass between a planet and a star.

Based on facts known about the giant planets Jupiter and Saturn in our own Solar System, a team of scientists led by Katelyn Allers of Bucknell University realized that they possibly could measure a brown dwarf’s wind speed by combining radio observations from the VLA and infrared observations from Spitzer.

“When we realized this, we were surprised that no one else had already done it,” Allers said.