NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope has captured an image of a nearby white dwarf star and its orbiting companion. The temperature of the latter is roughly equivalent to that of a hot summer day in Arizona.
"We have discovered a new record low temperature in the companion of a star recorded outside the solar system , to the point of being almost as cold as Earth," explains Kevin Luhman, an astronomer at Pennsylvania State University and lead author of two studies on the findings published in The Astrophysical Journal .
Based on the infrared light it emits, the cool object, named WD 0806-661 B , appears to have a temperature in the range of 27 to 70 ° C. At the low end, WD 0806-661 B offers a pretty Earth-friendly temperature and is n't even as hot as the human body . Its mass is between six and nine times that of Jupiter , which means that it can still be classified as a planet, specifically a gas giant. However, experts suspect that it is a type of failed star, a brown dwarf .
WD 0806-661 B likely belongs to a newly discovered class of objects called Y dwarfs , the coldest category of brown dwarfs. The WISE and Spitzer telescopes have proven to be complementary in the search for increasingly cooler brown dwarfs.
