Star Cooler Than Venus Found

crossconnects writes to mention that Discovery is reporting that astronomers have found a nearby star with a mild surface temperature of 660 degrees fahrenheit. "The spectacularly unspectacular object is of special interest because it falls right smack in the middle of the final frontier that divides mega-planets from the puniest stars. Stars in that realm theoretically qualify as an entirely new stellar type -- what's called a Y class dwarf."

Comments

Not that hard

[0racle]

Venus never was that hip.

Re:Not that hard

[riskeetee]

Agree, Serena's hotter.

Publication at arXiv.org

[Jugalator]

Here's the actual publication on the discovery:
http://arxiv.org/abs/0802.4387

... or straight to the PDF:
http://arxiv.org/pdf/0802.4387v2

Nuclear fusion?

[smolloy]

I thought the definition for a star was that there had to be fusion occurring at its core. TFA doesn't mention it, but I'm amazed that this object can be this cool, yet still have a nuclear furnace at its heart.

Fascinating stuff indeed.

Re:Nuclear fusion?

[Tenebrousedge]

Stars above about 13 jupiter masses fuse deuterium and above 65 jupiter masses also fuse lithium, according to Wikipedia. Below 13 jupiter masses, well, it's hard to say...

Re:Nuclear fusion?

[Ironsides]

TFA doesn't mention it, but I'm amazed that this object can be this cool, yet still have a nuclear furnace at its heart.

Perhaps it's using cold fusion? (ba dump dum)

Re:Nuclear fusion?

[g0dsp33d]

Or physicists can do what they usually do and discover "dark" fission.

Sigh, Bad English / Hmm - Biosphere?

[TexVex]

FTA: That means any water in there atmospheres will condense into droplets of water vapor

Aside from the bad English, the quoted bit is actually the most interesting part of the article. Does that mean that a particularly low-temp one of this newly discovered kind of dwarf star could be a self-contained biosphere, with a source of heat in the center surrounded by a life-sustaining atmosphere with liquid water in it?

Dyson Sphere is to Ringworld as Cool Dwarf is to Smoke Ring! :)

I'm one of Venus' best friends...

[Anonymous Coward]

... and I have a hard time believing there are many stars out there that are even "as cool" as Venus. Venus is so fucking awesome that it's just absurd for anybody to claim they've found a star cooler than her.

Re:Fahrenheit

[amRadioHed]

No, not when audience is the American public.

Re:Fahrenheit

[treeves]

What, they should have used Rankine?

Re:Fahrenheit

[duffel]

Then we should use Degrees Delisle, which has the added bonus of going backwards. Body temperature is at 95 Delisle. The sun (ours, that is) is at negative several thousand degrees Delisle.

Re:Fahrenheit

[jd]

The "temperature" of the Big Bang is the theoretical hottest you can ever get, since at that point all mass was in the form of energy, and therefore you had the maximum energy at the maximum density. Nothing can ever exceed that. Thus, if you knew what that was, you could assign it a fixed value as your upper end of the scale. The ideal would be to then have a set of functions (linear, logarithmic, whatever), where a given function was selected for a specific type of application, with the exception of some specific function chosen as the 'standard'.

Discovery Channel's Target Audience != Scientists

[GradiusCVK]

To some degree, you are correct; American scientists, the target audience of the original publication, would prefer the Kelvin unit, which was indeed used in the original publication. However, I don't think the Discovery channel's target audience is primarily scientists but rather the American public, which prefers Farenheit - hence the use of that unit on the Discovery channel's website (the location of TFA).