Scientists discover a strange celestial body hotter than the sun

Scientists have discovered a weird object that blurs the line between planets and stars.

This eerie, super-hot object is breaking records and challenging astronomers’ understanding of the line between stars and planets.

Dubbed WD0032-317B, the object is a brown dwarf (also known as a brown dwarf), a bright gaseous “protostar.” The atmospheric composition of brown dwarfs is usually similar to that of Jupiter, but 13 to 80 times larger. Objects of this mass would begin to fuse hydrogen isotopes in their cores. However, they are not yet massive enough to spark the fully self-sustaining stellar fusion that could power stars like our Sun.

Brown dwarfs typically burn at around 2,200 degrees Celsius. That’s pretty cool compared to most stars, which have surface temperatures of about 3,700 degrees Celsius.

But WD0032-317B, located about 1,400 light-years from Earth, is different from most brown dwarfs. The researchers said in a paper published on the database of the preprint website of Archif papers and accepted by the British journal Nature Astronomy that they measured and found that the surface temperature of the celestial body was as high as 7,700 degrees Celsius. That’s hot enough to break down the molecules in its atmosphere into the atoms that make them up. The body is also thousands of degrees hotter than the sun‘s surface temperature.

For a brown dwarf, this should be impossible. But the researchers found that the object gets help from the star it orbits, an ultra-hot white dwarf. WD0032-317B is so close to its star that its year (one revolution) is only 2.3 hours. Such a close distance means that WD0032-317B is tidally locked, with one side always facing the orbiting star and the other side never facing the star, according to the US website “Closely Watching Science”.

The brown dwarf’s “day side” is as hot as 7,700 degrees Celsius, but its “night side” is a relatively mild 1,000 to 2,700 degrees Celsius. According to the researchers, this is the most extreme temperature difference astronomers have ever measured on a single celestial body. But that won’t last long, and the brown dwarf will eventually be vaporized by the star it orbits as its molecules fall apart.