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A £200 million Nasa space telescope has picked out a star with a surface cooler than a human body - at just 25 degrees celsius, it's around room temperature. It's the coldest 'brown dwarf' ever detected outside the solar system. Like other brown dwarfs, it began life like a star - before it collapsed under its own weight into a dense ball of gas. But unlike a star, it didn't 'ignite'.
But, unlike a star, it didn't have enough mass to fuse atoms at its core, and shine steadily with starlight. Instead, it has continued to cool and fade since its birth, and now gives off only a feeble amount of infrared light. ISE's highly sensitive infrared detectors were able to catch the glow of this object during its two year sky-scan - stitching together an incredible 'sky Atlas' from 2.7 million telescope images which capture the whole sky around us, and pick out details from cold, dusty galaxies, to tiny, distant stars. Half a billion stars are visible in the 'Atlas', which shows every part of the sky visible from Earth, captured by hi-tech infrared instruments which can pick out dusty and distant objects invisible to many other telescopes.
Space telescope picks out 'green dot' in a field of stars - a tiny star whose surface is cooler than human blood
A £200 million Nasa space telescope has picked out a star with a surface cooler than a human body - at just 25 degrees celsius, it's around room temperature.
www.dailymail.co.uk
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