Star is discovered to be a close neighbor of the Sun and the coldest of its kind
Friday, April 25, 2014 - 14:01
in Astronomy & Space
(Phys.org) —A "brown dwarf" star that appears to be the coldest of its kind—as frosty as Earth's North Pole—has been discovered by a Penn State University astronomer using NASA's Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE) and Spitzer Space Telescopes. Images from the space telescopes also pinpointed the object's distance at 7.2 light-years away, making it the fourth closest system to our Sun.