Two articles, one published in the journal “Nature” and one in “The Astrophysical Journal Letters”, report the results of two independent studies on Gliese 229 B, the first brown dwarf whose existence was confirmed, which conclude that it’s actually a pair of close brown dwarfs. A team led by Caltech researcher Jerry Xuan used the GRAVITY and CRIRES+ instruments mounted on ESO’s VLT in Chile while a team led by Sam Whitebook, also from Caltech, and Tim Brandt of the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore, used the NIRSPEC instrument installed at the Keck Observatory in Hawaii. There were already suspicions about the nature of Gliese 229 B due to some inconsistencies detected in its characteristics but only now was it possible to find the evidence.