The coldest brown dwarf star known to exist has been discovered by NASA’s Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer and the Spitzer Space Telescope.
The coldest brown dwarf star known to exist has been discovered by NASA’s Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer and the Spitzer Space Telescope.
It is the fourth closest star to our own at 7 point 2 light-years away, and is as cold as the North Pole on Earth with temperatures reaching between negative 54 and negative 9 degrees Fahrenheit.
Kevin Luhman, an astronomer at Pennsylvania State University's Center for Exoplanets and Habitable Worlds, University Park is quoted as saying: "It's very exciting to discover a new neighbor of our solar system that is so close. And given its extreme temperature, it should tell us a lot about the atmospheres of planets, which often have similarly cold temperatures."
Brown dwarf stars don’t have enough mass to burn nuclear fuel like other stars, and can be easily missed when viewed from a visible light telescope, so astronomers were only able to see it using infrared light.
The star is estimated to be around 3 to 10 times the size of Jupiter, making it one of the smallest brown dwarfs known to exist in the universe.
That means it could be a gas giant, but experts think that it is actually a brown dwarf star.
