(ORDO NEWS) — A team of astronomers have discovered a new unusual object in the interstellar space of our Galaxy, which has so baffled them that they have dubbed it “The Accident” (“Accident”).
“Accident” resembles a brown dwarf, which is a class of cosmic objects that are an intermediate link between the largest gas giants and the smallest stars.
Brown dwarfs are not massive enough to trigger the fusion reaction that gives stars their intense brightness.
The new discovery is unique in that brown dwarfs tend to be relatively young objects, but the Caltech research team that discovered Casualty has calculated that it is between 10 and 13 billion years old.
Their study , published in The Astrophysical Journal Letters, hints at the existence of an entirely new class of celestial bodies that have so far remained unknown to science.
Mysterious object
“Accident” was opened by a stroke of luck . The object is so different from other brown dwarfs that it was excluded from surveys that included 2000 brown dwarfs that we know about within our Galaxy.
In a sense, “Accident,” bearing the dry scientific name WISEA J153429.75-104303.3, fits the dim, burn-out spectrum of a typical brown dwarf. But at other wavelengths, it “burns” much brighter.
“This object exceeded all of our expectations,” Davy Kirkpatrick, lead author of the study and Caltech astrophysicist, wrote in a press release.
Ancient riddle
The available evidence suggests that the Accident Object is about twice as old as a typical brown dwarf, which means it formed when the Milky Way had a completely different chemical composition.
“We assumed such old brown dwarfs existed, but we also thought they would be incredibly rare,” study co-author and Caltech astrophysicist Federico Morocco said in a press release.
“The fact that we found one such object so close to the solar system may indicate a lucky coincidence, or suggest that such objects are more common than we thought.”
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