[ad_1]
When you’re sitting by a campfire on a weekend, gazing up at the stars in the night sky, even the tiniest points of light are giant furnaces that generate intense heat; But among these celestial fiery bodies, some are so faint that they cannot be seen with the naked eye.
One of these faint stars is a brown dwarf smaller than Jupiter, about 37 light-years from Earth, which was recently discovered to be the coolest known star with a radio telescope. At a measly 425 degrees Celsius, this star is cooler than a normal fire and is an ideal mass for roasting marshmallows. In comparison, the temperature of our sun is about 5500 degrees Celsius.
Coy Rosea PhD student in astronomy at the University of Sydney According to the New York Times “A massive star like our Sun is a nuclear fusion machine that works well in space, compressing hydrogen gas into helium,” he says. This process produces a huge amount of energy that radiates from the star and is felt by us in the form of heat and light.
Brown dwarfs, sometimes called “failure stars,” are too small to have the powerful gravity needed to compress hydrogen to the point of nuclear fusion. Tara Murphya professor of astronomy at the University of Sydney and one of the authors of an article published last Thursday in Journal of Astrophysics “A brown dwarf is between a star and a planet in terms of mass and temperature,” it says. The existence of brown dwarfs was predicted 60 years ago; But since they are not very bright, they are very hard to find.
[ad_2]
Source link
