The AAS Nova featured a nice article by Lexi Gault on our new paper in which Fuda Nguyen and I propose that the polar regions of brown dwarfs (and most gas giant exoplanets) are different from the equatorial and mid-latitude regions: The poles are in a different circulation regime (vortex-dominated) – this means that they have different colors/spectra and evolve over different timescales than the rest of the brown dwarf atmosphere. We show that this hypothesis (and models built on it) explains multiple puzzling and seemingly unrelated trends observed in brown dwarfs. Lexi’s article provides a great summary of this idea!
