NASA's Spritzer Space Telescope and Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE) has found out that Earth's neighbor, a brown dwarf star has temperatures as low as our planet's North Pole.
The images gathered by these telescopes also showed that the star is only 7.2 light years away from Earth and is now considered as the fourth closest celestial body after our Sun.
"It's very exciting to discover a new neighbor of our solar system that is so close," astronomer at Pennsylvania State University's Center for Exoplanets and Habitable Worlds, University Park, Kevin Luhman, said in a press release. "And given its extreme temperature, it should tell us a lot about the atmospheres of planets, which often have similarly cold temperatures."
The brown dwarf star is called WISE J085510.83-071442.5 and was observed to have ice-cold temperatures ranging from minus 54 to 9 degrees Fahrenheit. WISE discovered the star during its observation of the entire sky using infrared light. There are also some areas which were observed thrice. Brown dwarf stars are cold and they sometimes appear invisible to visible-light telescope, however, they can be viewed through infrared light due to the thermal glow that they emit. Furthermore, the telescope captured that the brown dwarf star is moving rapidly around its orbit.
"This object appeared to move really fast in the WISE data," Luhman said in a press release. "That told us it was something special."
After observing that the star moves so fast, Luhman analyzed the images taken from the Gemini South Telescope in Chile and Spritzer to map out the star's different positions as it moves around the sun. WISE J085510.83-071442.5's size is estimated to be three to ten times as the size of Jupiter and scientists theorize that it could be a gas-filled planet ejected from our solar system.
Luhman's analysis of the images of WISE J085510.83-071442.5 also led him to discover another pair of brown dwarf stars which are much warmer than WISE J085510.83-071442.5.
