In research undertaken in the study of the differences in how stars and planets form, the brown dwarf has played a significant roll in expanding the knowledge thereof. Because a brown dwarf is comparable in size to that of the planet Jupiter, though it is of a much greater density and produces its own light. At somewhere between fifteen and eighty times the mass of Jupiter, the light they emit is so faint it is very hard to calculate just how many of them there are. Nor, alas, by what means it was that they were formed. And yet, like stars, there are more low-mass brown dwarfs then there are high-mass ones. This continues on, down to nearly 'planetary' mass ones. Suggesting that stars and free-floating brown dwarfs were formed in a very similar (if not the same) way. However, by the same token, there exists strong evidence that such proto-stellar bodies are very different than the recently discovered planets that orbit nearby stars. Thus far, they all tend to be 'loners' rather than in orbit around another sun. This suggests that planetary and stellar bodies formed as solar systems (including our own) formed in a very different manner indeed. Until recently, it was commonly believed that brown dwarfs were a rarity, and although there are certainly more than once thought, they are by no means sufficient in number to account for the 'dark matter' of the universe. Some fifty newly revealed brown dwarfs have been located in the Orion Nebula's Trapezium cluster, as well as others found in the cluster IC 348 (located in the Perseus constellation). It is through findings such as these that a better understanding of stars and planets form can be achieved.