Not to be outdone by the Keck II telescope in Hawaii, NASA's infrared Spitzer Space Telescope may have discovered a brown dwarf even cooler than the brown dwarf Discovery News reported on last week.
Keck spotted "CFBDSIR J1458+1013B," a brown dwarf 75 light-years from Earth with a mass of 6-15 times that of Jupiter, and from observations realized that this very dim object must have a temperature of less than 100 degrees Celsius (212 F) -- about as hot as boiling water.
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This discovery has very important ramifications for star and planetary physics, because a brown dwarf is neither a star or a planet, it is an object that bridges the gap between planets and stars. For this reason, and because brown dwarfs do not possess enough mass to sustain nuclear fusion in their cores, that they are often dubbed "failed stars."


So, the potential Spitzer discovery of an "ultra-cold" brown dwarf has excited scientists even more. Spitzer's candidate brown dwarf, detected 63 light-years from Earth with a mass of approximately seven times the mass of Jupiter, appears to have a temperature of 30 degrees Celsius (86 F)! This "room temperature" brown dwarf is called "WD 0806-661B."


http://news.discovery.com/space/ultr...er-110312.html

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