Sad Failed Star Is The Coldest Object Every Photographed. Like, Really Cold.

I can’t blame you if you associate stars with burning hot churning pinnacles of oblivion. However, sometimes they’re fucking cold. Like really cold.  WD 0806-661 B is a brown star that may be colder than the human body.

io9:

The brown dwarf, designated WD 0806-661 B, is the coldest star-like object we’ve ever been able to directly image. There’s a rather nice artist’s impression of the brown dwarf and its stellar companion, a white dwarf star that itself is the remnants of a collapsed sun. Located about 63 light-years from Earth, the brown dwarf has a temperature somewhere between 80 and 160 degrees Fahrenheit. That means there’s about a 25% chance that this thing is actually colder than the human body temperature.

Penn State astronomer Kevin Luhman describes the find:

“This planet-like companion is the coldest object ever directly photographed outside our solar system. Its mass is about the same as many of the known extra-solar planets – about six to nine times the mass of Jupiter – but in other ways it is more like a star. Essentially, what we have found is a very small star with an atmospheric temperature about cool as the Earth’s.

UC San Diego researcher Adam Burgasser adds:

“The distance of this white dwarf from its brown-dwarf companion is 2500 astronomical units (AU) – about 2500 times the distance between the Earth and the Sun, so its orbit is very large as compared with the orbits of planets, which form within a disk of dust swirling close around a newborn star.

Pretty dope. The Universe. Amazing.