Don't Bite Your Nails, And Get Out Of The Rain

Bizarro article:

Physicians removed 119 nails - many of them rusty - from a woman's stomach months after she apparently swallowed them, a doctor said.

But that isn't the strangest thing about iron....iron rain may be falling in the atmospheres of brown dwarf stars:

The atmospheres contain primarily gases, including gaseous iron and silicate. At hotter temperatures—3,140 degrees Fahrenheit (2,000 degrees Kelvin)—typical of younger brown dwarfs, the iron remains in its gaseous phase. Over time as the glowing body cools, the iron condenses to form iron-rich clouds and droplets of liquid-iron rain.

...And when it rains it pours: Not only did Burgasser and his team find these metallic clouds, but they also spotted evidence of violent storms. Thermodynamics would predict that as brown dwarfs release heat, they would dim—similar to a cooling ember. But the astronomers found that the older, and cooler, brown dwarfs shined brighter than the warmer, younger ones.

"These brown dwarfs are much brighter than they should be, and the only way for that to happen is for the clouds to disappear very suddenly so you're left with a very hot brown dwarf, which emits a lot of light, but doesn't have the same clouds," Burgasser said.

The most plausible explanation is an off-the-charts hurricane pummeling through the area and clearing the clouds. If the clouds were to clear naturally as the object cooled, that could take roughly 1 billion years, leaving a chilly brown dwarf, Burgasser told SPACE.com. He expects these clearings must be 100 times as quick, a "lightning-fast" 10 million years.

But what causes the cloudy disturbance? With cooling, a brown dwarf's cloud layer sinks closer to its surface.

"As the clouds form deeper in the atmosphere they are more sensitive to the winds and convective motions in the atmosphere," said Mark Marley, a scientist at NASA's Ames Research Center.

"This dynamics or 'weather' probably leads to the destruction of the clouds," Marley said by email, adding that he and others are working on promising ideas to explain the cloud-clearing mechanism.