Number 431 (Story #2), June 2, 1999 by Phillip F. Schewe and Ben Stein METHANE DWARFS is the name for a new type of celestial object. Actually they are a subclass of brown dwarf. With a mass of less than 80 times that of Jupiter, Brown dwarfs cannot sustain the fusion reactions that burn in our sun. At this week's meeting in Chicago of the American Astronomical Society, Zlatan Tsvetanov and Wei Zheng of Johns Hopkins University reported seeing several very red objects very like one observed (Gliese 229B) in 1995. The new objects, glimpsed with the Sloan Digital Sky Survey telescope, are red not because their spectrum has been red shifted owing to great distance, but because they are nearby and very cool. In fact they are cool enough to permit the presence of methane, which normally dissociates amid the heat of stars and even in other, warmer, brown dwarfs. (Fermilab press release, 31 May; www.aas.org/meetings/aas194/program/index.html)