It’s extremely red, meaning it’s brighter at longer infrared wavelengths than most brown dwarfs. Weirder yet, the colors really were strange. The star shown would be an extremely low mass red dwarf, which can be roughly the same size as Jupiter though much denser. But that meant it was incredibly dim, which is weird.ĭiagram showing relative masses and sizes of planets, brown dwarfs, and stars. They were able to find it in archived data from Spitzer Space Telescope, however, and got images of it using an infrared filter on the Hubble Space Telescope’s Wide Field Camera 3.įrom this they were able to get a parallax for the object, giving it a distance from Earth of just 53 light years - pretty close. They observed it with one of the huge twin Keck 10-meter infrared telescopes, but it was so faint it couldn’t be seen. Once alerted, a team of astronomers started digging deeper. In other words, he discovered it by accident (and in fact the object is nicknamed The Accident). The software didn’t ping it as a brown dwarf because it didn’t match the color profile expected of such an object. He was looking at another brown dwarf in the data when he noticed an extremely faint blip in the images that appeared to be moving very rapidly with time. Because the brown dwarfs we can see tend to be close by, they move across the sky over time due to both the Earth’s motion around the Sun and the brown dwarfs’ own motions through space. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/Dan CaseldenĬaselden wrote software that removed stationary objects like stars in images. Because of this, the ones we tend to find are close by and relatively young if they’re too far away or too old they’re too faint to spot.Īnimation of actual WISE images of the sky showing the motion (lower left, circled) of the extremely faint and odd brown dwarf WISEA J153429.75−104303.3. They are extremely faint at visible light wavelengths, and but glow feebly in infrared light due to their own internal heat leftover from their formation. He was hunting for brown dwarfs, objects that are more massive than planets but less massive than stars.īrown dwarfs were only discovered for the first time in the 1990s, after being theorized to exist for decades. Its discovery is a story all by itself: It was found by citizen scientist Dan Caselden, who wrote his own software to go through WISE data. The object is called WISEA J153429.75−104303.3 (WISE is the Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer space observatory, and the numbers are its coordinates on the sky let’s call it WISE 1534 for short). A very odd object has been found zipping through the galaxy on a path relatively near to the Sun, and while nothing quite like it has ever been seen before, it may be the first of many such old, cold things prevalent in the Milky Way.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |