Evidence of water clouds found on brown dwarf

An analysis of data obtained from a brown dwarf has showed strong evidence of the existence of clouds of water or water ice — the first such clouds detected outside of our solar system.

WISE 0855 is only 7.2 light-years from the Earth and is the coldest-known object outside of our solar system. The brown dwarf is just barely visible at infrared wavelengths with the largest ground-based telescopes.

more..

Probably could have been worded better.
I’ll go and read it.

Well this site did teach me the answer to a question I asked in chat and got no reply “could Jupiter become a star”
Not massive enough, apparently.

Peak Warming Man said:

Well this site did teach me the answer to a question I asked in chat and got no reply “could Jupiter become a star”
Not massive enough, apparently.

Around 8 Jupiter solar masses so I heard

i heard 70….

CrazyNeutrino said:

Peak Warming Man said:

Well this site did teach me the answer to a question I asked in chat and got no reply “could Jupiter become a star”
Not massive enough, apparently.

Around 8 Jupiter solar masses so I heard

oops I left out a zero

http://www.universetoday.com/109593/could-jupiter-become-a-star/

from the link

But the Sun isn’t the smallest possible star you can have. In fact, if you have about 7.5% the mass of the Sun’s worth of hydrogen collected together, you’ll get a red dwarf star. So the smallest red dwarf star is still about 80 times the mass of Jupiter. You know the drill, find 79 more Jupiters, crash them into Jupiter, and we’d have a second star in the Solar System.

this bit is interesting too

There’s another object that’s less massive than a red dwarf, but it’s still sort of star like: a brown dwarf. This is an object which isn’t massive enough to ignite in true fusion, but it’s still massive enough that deuterium, a variant of hydrogen, will fuse. You can get a brown dwarf with only 13 times the mass of Jupiter. Now that’s not so hard, right? Find 13 more Jupiters, crash them into the planet?

CrazyNeutrino said:

Evidence of water clouds found on brown dwarf

An analysis of data obtained from a brown dwarf has showed strong evidence of the existence of clouds of water or water ice — the first such clouds detected outside of our solar system.

WISE 0855 is only 7.2 light-years from the Earth and is the coldest-known object outside of our solar system. The brown dwarf is just barely visible at infrared wavelengths with the largest ground-based telescopes.

more..

From Wikipedia:

“WISE 0855−0714 (full designation WISE J085510.83−071442.5) is a (sub-)brown dwarf 2.31±0.08 parsecs (7.53+0.27−0.25 light-years) from Earth announced in April 2014 by Kevin Luhman using data from the Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE). As of 2014, WISE 0855−0714 has the third-highest proper motion (8130±22 mas/yr) after Barnard’s Star (10300 mas/yr) and Kapteyn’s Star (8600 mas/yr). As of 2014 it also has the fourth-largest parallax (433±15 mas) of any known star or brown dwarf, meaning it is the fourth closest extrasolar system to the Sun. It is also the coldest object of its type found in interstellar space, having a temperature between 225 to 260 K (−48 to −13 °C; −55 to 8 °F).”

I hate the phrase “sub-brown dwarf”. It’s either a brown dwarf or a free planet. Y0 is probably a brown dwarf. Y1 is probably a free planet. The “probably” depends on age, a young free planet looks like an old brown dwarf.

As for water, good on them for getting enough light to get a good-enough spectrum. Water is commonly (always?) present in the spectra of brown dwarfs, and sometimes even in red dwarfs.