When do aging brown dwarfs sweep the clouds away?

Brown dwarfs, the larger cousins of giant planets, undergo atmospheric changes from cloudy to cloudless as they age and cool. A team of astronomers led by Carnegie's Jonathan Gagné measured for the first time the temperature at which this shift happens in young brown dwarfs. Their findings, published by the Astrophysical Journal Letters, may help them better understand how gas giant planets like our own Solar System's Jupiter evolved.