NASA scientists have discovered a brown dwarf that appears to be the coldest substellar object discovered in our solar system to date.
Officials reported that this brown dwarf is about as cold as the North Pole.
Astronomers used NASA's Wide-Field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE) and Spitzer Space Telescope to find the star 7.2 light-years away, according to Yahoo! News.
The star's location makes it the fourth closest system to the Sun.
"It's very exciting to discover a new neighbor of our solar system that is so close," said Kevin Luhman, an astronomer at Pennsylvania State University's Center for Exoplanets and Habitable Worlds. "And given its extreme temperature, it should tell us a lot about the atmospheres of planets, which often have similarly cold temperatures."
The star has a temperature between negative 54 and 9 degrees Fahrenheit, possessing the record for the coldest brown dwarf. Other brown dwarfs that have been discovered by humans have measured around room temperature, News 92FM reported.
"It is remarkable that even after many decades of studying the sky, we still do not have a complete inventory of the sun's nearest neighbors," Michael Werner, the project scientist for Spitzer at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., said in a statement.
The dwarf has been named WISE J085510.83-071442.5, Yahoo! News reported.
Brown dwarfs are sometimes called "failed stars" because they do not have the mass that is needed to start nuclear fusion in their core, which prevents them from radiating starlight.
The lack of heat that these dwarfs are able to give off makes them difficult to see with the naked eye, RT reported. The space agency used infrared telescope technology to find the brown dwarf.
WISE J085510.83-071442.5 is calculated to be between 3 and 10 times the mass of Jupiter.
"This exciting new result demonstrates the power of exploring the universe using new tools, such as the infrared eyes of WISE and Spitzer," Werner said.
