Scientists believe that the magnificent but puzzling characteristics of brown dwarfs, weird cosmic peculiarities that blur the lines between planets and stars, has just exposed how huge and cold they really are.
The scientist added these latest findings may shed light on the structure and development of distant alien worlds.
Brown dwarfs, who look like stars, are often called “failed stars” due to their size in comparison with planets. Brown stars are bigger than the planets – about five to 20 times bigger than the planet Jupiter -- however, too tiny to cause nuclear fusion and ignite into a brightness of a full-pledged star. It is because brown dwarfs only have small amount of heat they are born with.
These latest findings imply that brown dwarfs, the coldest ones, are as cold as between 125 to 175 degrees Celsius (260 to 350 degrees Fahrenheit).
“These objects we were studying were suspected to be colder than anything else that had previously been discovered in the solar neighborhood.” In addition, he accounted “Several hundred have been detected to date,” said Trent Dupuy, the study’s lead author and an astronomer at the Harvard Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge, to Space.com.
The dim and distance of these cold brown dwarfs once made it difficult for scientists to confirm just how far, big, luminous and cold they were. However, with the use of NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope, scientists have measured the accurate distances to eight brown dwarfs. Thus, this helped them know just how luminous, cold and big brown dwarfs are.
The scientists have analyzed how the distance of these brown dwarfs varied in connection with the farther distant background stars as the Earth finished an orbit around the sun. This aided triangulate the position of the brown stars. There were only slight differences, so the scientists should collect data for a year patiently.
