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Astronomers first scrutinized the mysterious Milky Way An object known as an “accident” -and found it to be even more complex than previous studies have shown.

The accident is not entirely a star (scientists can know from its dim glow that there is nothing Nuclear fusion It powers the object), and it’s not a planet either. According to a study published on June 30 Astrophysical Journal Letter, Accidents are in the middle — a rare class of objects known as brown dwarfs, or failed stars.

Brown dwarfs can be up to 80 times larger than Jupiter, but brown dwarfs usually hold only a small portion of Jupiter’s mass. EarthAccording to the sun Britannica.. Astronomers suspect that these objects have begun life like stars, but have not accumulated enough mass to sustain fusion. Instead, brown dwarfs slowly cool and dim over millions or billions of years until they are nothing more than dull red or purple embers.

Brown dwarfs are too dim to see with the naked eye, but scientists have detected them in the Milky Way using about 2,000 such objects. Infrared A telescope such as NASA’s Near-Earth Object Wide Area Infrared Survey Explorer (NEOWISE). The accident was revealed in one such NEOWISE survey of the sky when civil scientists plunged across the screen and glanced at an object photobombing another group of brown dwarf candidates. (This accidental discovery gave the object its nickname).

The accident puzzled scientists after the surprising discovery. It didn’t look like a typical brown dwarf. This object appears faint at some infrared wavelengths, suggesting that it was a very cold and old brown dwarf, but at other wavelengths it looks bright, indicating a warm, young brown dwarf. increase.

“This object was against all our expectations,” said Davy Kirkpatrick, a leading research author and astrophysicist at the California Institute of Technology. Said in a statement..

This contradiction puzzled astronomers and sent them to hunt for illogical objects with NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope and Spitzer Space Telescope, and the infrared telescope at the WM Keck Observatory in Hawaii. With this additional data, researchers learned that the accident was even stranger than previously believed.

For one thing, it’s moving fast.Located at about 50 Light year Accidents from Earth zoom our galaxy at about 500,000 mph (800,000 km / h). This is much faster than a typical brown dwarf. According to astronomers, this fact is probably very old in the accident, gravity Accelerate the movement of larger objects for billions of years.

The elements of the object’s atmosphere are also puzzling. Astronomers have learned that objects are low in methane, a common gas in brown dwarfs at temperatures similar to accidents, based on the wavelengths of infrared rays emitted by the accident.Methane hydrogen When carbon, Methane deficiency, the Milky Way is almost completely filled with hydrogen, helium However, there is almost no carbon. (Carbon came later as the oldest star exploded and spread the elements throughout the galaxy).

All this suggests that the accident was a very old, incredibly cold brown dwarf, formed when the galaxy was methane-poor. This object is more than twice the median age of all other known brown dwarfs.

“It’s not surprising to find a brown dwarf this old, but it’s a surprise to find a brown dwarf in the backyard,” said Federico Marocco, an astrophysicist and co-author of the study at the California Institute of Technology. .. “I expected this old brown dwarf to exist, but I expected it to be incredibly rare. The possibility of finding a brown dwarf very close to the solar system may be a lucky coincidence.”

Researchers have said that even the most sophisticated infrared telescopes may find it difficult to find older, ultra-cold brown dwarfs, given how dim they look. But thanks to trained astronomers and citizen scientists, it’s only a matter of time before someone encounters another accident by looking at the stars more than ever.

Excerpted from https://eminetra.com/a-mysterious-object-called-an-accident-has-been-cared-for-for-10-billion-years-through-the-milky-way/722771/