I'm sorry, Aramis, but I'm afraid that you must have misread the page you just posted, because it disproves what you said about Wolf 359, and otherwise confirms what I said above.
Specifically, it mentions
Wolf 359 as being an M6V star (see Table 18.1 on the next page), and declares that it has a mass of 0.09 Sol. These numbers are both consistent with the minimum rating for a fusing (stellar) body. Later in the paragraph it also describes the M9V star
DEN 1048-3956 as a brown dwarf, and notes that its mass is about 0.07. This, too, is consistent with the numbers for a non-fusing substellar object.
Most calculations put the minimum mass for hydrogen fusion at around 0.08-0.085 Sol, although if you fiddle with ignition temperatures you can reach lower theoretical masses. I suppose, also, that if you started out with a
really slow-spinning body you could be able to initiate fusion at a lower mass, too.* That might be something Grandfather or one of his kids might fiddle around with for a lark.
Table 18.1 also throws in
SCR J1845-6357 (M8.5V), which is another recognized brown dwarf, as well as DX Cancri and Teegarden's Star. Both of them are listed as M6.5V, which seems to be sort of a 'parking space' for uncertain cases. SIMBAD shows
Teegarden's Star as an M8/9V brown dwarf, for example, but
DX Cancri as an M6.5V red dwarf. There is some evidence that DX Cancri is very young, and thus punching a bit above its weight right now, so I would not at all be surprised if future data moved it down a bit, and it wound up a brown dwarf too.
If I were the evil dictator of astrophysics, I would do just what you said, and Pluto all those non-fusing objects down to the substellar L, T and Y categories (and as long as I was there, I'd do something about the mess that is late K star typing, too). And unlike Pluto, the laymen would hardly notice if I did it, right? But I'm not the ED of A, and nor am I well enough acquainted with him to petition him to do something about it, so we're stuck with the artifacts for now. Though I suppose we could just declare that sometime between now and the 57th Century
someone finally got around to straightening things out.
Of course, that would mean adjusting the M-Type tables in
Scouts for mass, luminosity, orbits, etc... Ugh.
*Actually, come to think of it, that second one is probably going to happen out there in the wild at some point in the future, once some marginally M7V brown dwarf spins down just enough to let gravity take over and do its thing. Hey, I think we just figured out a way to extend the length of the Stelliferous Era!
