Posted on Tuesday, August 26, 2014
WISE J0855-0714, a brown dwarf 7.3 light-years from the Solar System might be the first object outside of our system that shows signs of water ice clouds in its atmosphere.
The brown dwarf is the coldest known this far, with a temperature below zero degrees Celsius. Because of its smallness and the low temperature, it was first discovered with a space telescope - NASA’s WISE infrared space telescope.
The cloud observations however were made with the 6.5-meter Magellan Baade telescope in Chile, where astronomers took 151 near-infrared images, where the observations matched models of a brown dwarf with clouds of water ice and sodium sulfide.
The discovery hasn't been confirmed yet as it requires spectra, which might have to wait until the launch of the James Webb Space Telescope.
The brown dwarf is the coldest known this far, with a temperature below zero degrees Celsius. Because of its smallness and the low temperature, it was first discovered with a space telescope - NASA’s WISE infrared space telescope.
The cloud observations however were made with the 6.5-meter Magellan Baade telescope in Chile, where astronomers took 151 near-infrared images, where the observations matched models of a brown dwarf with clouds of water ice and sodium sulfide.
The discovery hasn't been confirmed yet as it requires spectra, which might have to wait until the launch of the James Webb Space Telescope.
Labels: brown dwarf, news, water ice clouds