Artists impression showing a brown dwarf surrounded by a swirling disc of planet-building dust. NASAs Spitzer Space Telescope spotted such a disc around a surprisingly low-mass brown dwarf, or failed star. The brown dwarf, called OTS 44, is only 15 times the size of Jupiter, making it the smallest brown dwarf known to host a planet-forming, or protoplanetary disc. Astronomers believe that this unusual system will eventually spawn planets. If so, they speculate that OTS 44s disc has enough mass to make one small gas giant and a few Earth-sized rocky planets. OTS 44 is about 2 million years old.