I don’t know what it is about brown dwarfs, but I just love these things. Maybe it’s the thought of a bunch of cold bodies wandering unseen, up to now anyway, through interstellar space:
Luhman classifies this object as a “brown dwarf,” an object that formed just like a star out of a massive cloud of dust and gas. But the mass that a brown dwarf accumulates is not enough to ignite thermonuclear reactions in its core, resulting in a failed star that is very cool. In the case of the new brown dwarf, the scientists have gauged the temperature of its surface to be between 80 and 160 degrees Fahrenheit — possibly as cool as a human.
Gregory says
Tut, tut. They are “little stars of color.”