Brown Dwarf Hits Record Low

astroengine writes "The Keck II infrared telescope on Mauna Kea, Hawaii, has spotted what appears to be the coldest brown dwarf ever detected. Astronomers from the University of Hawaii have managed to constrain its temperature to just shy of 100 degrees Celsius. The object is part of a brown dwarf binary system and is estimated to be 6-15 times the mass of Jupiter. This is an exciting object as it could belong to a so-far theoretical 'Y' class of brown dwarf, a classification that makes objects like this cool example more planet-like than star-like."

Comments

So maybe they can find water on it?

[tomhudson]

After all, at the pressures we're talking about, water would be liquid well above 100 degrees C.

what if there are a lot of these? a heck of a lot?

[circletimessquare]

we look up at the night sky and see only the bight stars, and assume everything else is vacuum. what if there is a relationship on the order of 100 invisible brown dwarf/ orphan jupiter planetary systems for every regular star system? or 1,000/1 or 10,000/1 or 100,000/1 or more?

i bet as we get better at trying to find exoplanets, we also find a lot of dead dark planetary systems out there. gravitationally bound, but completely without light. a jupiter, just sitting there all alone in the void, with its assemblage of moons/ planets, frozen, and without any light... but not rare at all, all over the place in fact and much more numerous than familiar ignited and main sequence star systems

i mean, star creation should assume a gaussian distribution in terms of star size, right? doesn't that just make simple entropic sense? well look at the wide base of that gaussian curve, below the minimum size needed for ignition: its huge! in overall mass and in number. so if the size spread of star systems is truly gaussian, then there should be orders of magnitude more dark systems out there than ignited systems. i bet we find legions of these systems, or, rather infer legions of them, and just never know for sure, because, of course, they are pitch dark and energetically completely dead

occlusion of other star systems would be the only way to see them. and even then, since they are so small and so far away, and occlusion would be once and probably not ever again, they would be much harder to find than exoplanets, unless they were close to our solar system. they would just become noise in the number of photons hitting earth