Astronomy

Star is discovered to be a close neighbor of the Sun and the coldest of its kind

A Penn State University astronomer using NASA's Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE) has detected a new brown dwarf star at a distance of 7.2 light years away from us. It is the fourth closest system to our Sun. What is peculiar about this brown dwarf is it's temperature, which closely resemble the temperatures of our North Pole at -53 to 9 degrees Fahrenheit. The coldest brown dwarf discovered was only at room temperatures. Kevin Luhman, an associate professor of Astronomy and Astrophysics at Penn State and a researcher in the Penn State Center for Exoplanets and Habitable Worlds, says that this discovery can tell us the temperatures of the planets in that solar system. "Brown dwarfs start their lives like stars, as collapsing balls of gas, but they lack the mass to burn nuclear fuel and radiate starlight." 


WISE was able to detect this star because it surveyed the sky using infrared twice, scanning some areas up to three times. Luhman says that this is not an ideal place for human exploration because the planets are not habitable for humans. Because the star is too cold, it would not be able to provide warmth to the planets in its solar system. The star is predicted to be about 3 to 10 times the size of Jupiter. This small mass makes some scientist believe that it might be a gas giant but other scientists say otherwise. If the case is that it is a brown dwarf, it would be one of the least massive brown dwarfs. 


Sources:

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2014/04/140425162339.htm 

Posted by Unknown | at 10:05 AM