A very foreign object called WISE J085510.83 - 071442.5 lies just 7.2 light - years from the worldly concern . Discovered by the spacious - field Infrared Survey Explorer ( WISE ) , it is nominally one of those not - quite - planet - not - quite - star known as a dark-brown midget .
Because they are so much smaller and cool than stars , brown dwarf come along red and swoon . But stargazer Kevin Luhman notice that WISE J085510.83 - 071442.5 was very red and very faint-hearted … part because it is small-scale — perhaps only 2 to 10 times the mass of Jupiter — and partially because it is so cold . It ’s temperature , Luhman found , is only about 9 ° F ( -13 ° cytosine ) . That ’s well below the freezing item of water . In other words , the brown dwarf is literally ice cold . The fact that it is so cold is a clew to its age . If it start out at a few thousand degrees it would have take on somewhere between 1 and 10 billion long time to have cooled to its present temperature .
It may well be that instead of beinga chocolate-brown nanus , this aim may in reality be one of the half twelve or so orphic rogue planets , the first of which was first observed in 2010 . These are worlds that , as the result of some catastrophe , were turf out from their home systems and now orb the wandflower directly , as our sun does .
Luhman rule that WISE J085510.83 - 071442.5 is affect in sex act to the background of asterisk . Most asterisk do , but this one appear to be really traveling . This speeding coalesce with a measurement of the body ’s parallax ( the amount by which it appear to shift against the backdrop lead as the earth moved from one side of its celestial orbit to the other ) enable Luhman to compute its space . WISE J085510.83 - 071442.5 twist out to be the seventh unaired star to our own .
watching of WISE J085510.83 - 071442.5 by the WISE and Spitzer telescopes reveal the speedy motion of the brown dwarf over the past four years . Photo by NASA / JPL - Caltech / Penn State ]
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