brown 2 are 3 failed stars: they lack enough mass for gravity to trigger the nuclear reactions that make stars shine. the newly discovered brown 1, identified as cfbdsir 1458 10b, is the dimmer member of a 4(二元的) brown dwarf system located just 75 light-years from earth. the powerful x-shooter spectrograph on eso's very large telescope (vlt) was used to show that the composite object was very cool by brown dwarf standards. "we were very excited to see that this object had such a low temperature, but we couldn't have guessed that it would turn out to be a double system and have an even more interesting, even colder component," said philippe delorme of the institut de planétologie et d'astrophysique de grenoble (cnrs/université joseph fourier), a co-author of the paper. cfbdsir 1458 10 is the coolest brown dwarf binary found to date.
the dimmer of the two dwarfs has now been found to have a temperature of about 100 degrees 5 — the boiling point of water, and not much different from the temperature inside a sauna(桑拿浴) . "at such temperatures we expect the brown dwarf to have properties(性能,道具) that are different from 6 known brown dwarfs and much closer to those of giant exoplanets — it could even have water clouds in its atmosphere," said michael liu of the university of hawaii's institute for astronomy, who is lead author of the paper describing this new work. "in fact, once we start taking images of gas-giant planets around sun-like stars in the near future, i expect that many of them will look like cfbdsir 1458 10b."
7 the secrets of this unique object involved exploiting the power of three different telescopes. cfbdsir 1458 10 was first found to be a binary using the laser guide star (lgs) adaptive optics system on the keck ii telescope in hawaii. liu and his colleagues then employed the canada–france–hawaii telescope, also in hawaii, to determine the distance to the brown dwarf duo using an 8 camera. finally the eso vlt was used to study the object's infrared 9 and measure its temperature.
the hunt for cool objects is a very active 10 hot topic. the spitzer space telescope has recently identified two other very faint objects as other possible contenders for the coolest known brown dwarfs, although their temperatures have not been measured so 11. future observations will better determine how these objects compare to cfbdsir 1458 10b. liu and his colleagues are planning to observe cfbdsir 1458 10b again to better determine its properties and to begin mapping the binary's orbit, which, after about a decade of monitoring, should allow 12 to determine the binary's mass.