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Astronomers Discover the Coolest Known Sub-Stellar Body
Hugh Pickens writes "Science Daily reports that using the United Kingdom Infrared Telescope (UKIRT) in Hawaii, astronomers have discovered what may be the coolest sub-stellar body ever found outside our own solar system. Too small to be stars and with insufficient mass to maintain hydrogen-burning nuclear fusion reactions in their cores, 'brown dwarfs' have masses smaller than stars but larger than gas giant planets like Jupiter, with an upper limit in between 75 and 80 Jupiter masses. 'This looks like the fourth time in three years that the UKIRT has made a record breaking discovery of the coolest known brown dwarf, with an estimated temperature not far above 200 degrees Celsius,' says Dr. Philip Lucas at the University of Hertfordshire. Due to their low temperature these objects are very faint in visible light, and are detected by their glow at infrared wavelengths. The object known as SDSS1416+13B is in a wide orbit around a somewhat brighter and warmer brown dwarf, SDSS1416+13A, and the pair is located between 15 and 50 light years from the solar system, which is quite close in astronomical terms."
I'm sure there is a joke in here somewhere involving aliens and mood lighting...
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(Puts on shades.)
Yeah.
Brown dwarfs stars are cooler than some of the (exo)planets found already?
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All depends on how close it is and what it masses. True for any body that passed by that wasn't radiating so much it would vaporize the place.
Oops - and it's velocity of course.
An object with 75 to 80 times the mass of Jupiter passing through the Solar System would cause way more chaos than that. Trust me, you'd be well aware of its presence.
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Given brown dwarfs generally have no heat source, they cool quickly and we expect there to be cold ones out there. Is the bigger news the fact that we could detect this cool object, or the information gained by finding this brown dwarf?
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So Fonzie is now a body in outer space?
Shouldn't they be looking for the hottest stellar body, if you know what I mean?
I know we can't make too many assumptions, but I think common sense would indicate there's trillions of these things floating out there. I would think there's more of these in the galaxy than stars, if you just continue the mass/frequency curve past the point that fusion ignites.
For everyone who read this thinking it meant "cool" as in "awesome".
Funny may not give karma, but +5 Informative never made anyone snort coffee out their nose.
I mean if Jupiter’s surface temperature is below 200 degrees Celsius (and i bet it is), and since it’s also a brown dwarf (even with nuclear reactions going on in its core), shouldn’t it be even cooler?
Also, what about Saturn, Neptune and Uranus, who just as much count as brown dwarfs, since they are mainly built like a star.
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Since it's the coolest known, if Fonzie doesn't already have a sub-stellar body named after him, this one should be it.
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Sounds like it's time for someone with the relevant expertise to update this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brown_dwarf#Spectral_class_Y
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What would a brown dwarf do if it passed close by to earth... since they are hard to detect I can assume we wouldn't see it coming.
Um, it would be a lot easier to see coming than the planet Jupiter. What makes a brown dwarf hard to detect is that it's not close to a star (if it was, it would be a large exoplanet instead). Obviously it one was passing close by Earth, it would be close to a star (the Sun) and would be extremely easy to detect. "Impossible to miss" would be a better description. Depending on how close, it would likely be the brightest object in the sky, visible in broad daylight, for a few centuries before it got too close.
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I was always of the understanding that most of the mass for the moon came not from some of the mars sized mass that hit earth rebounding, but instead from the opposite side of the earth from the impact. Sort of like a Newtons cradle. So, mars sized mass hits earth and some of it does break up and maybe end up as part of the moon, but most of it just gets swallowed by earth, the shockwave blows off a huge piece of the earth on a similar trajectory some of which returns to earth and the rest of which accumulates into the moon.
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A system of brown dwarfs (dwarves?) like this must be an awesome sight, although I expect this one is probably too widely separated to be all that spectacular. But the idea of a gas giant/brown dwarf so large it has planets the size of Jupiter as moons is pretty staggering.