(ORDO NEWS) — Using the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), an international team of astronomers has discovered a new, dim, distant, and cool brown dwarf.
The newly discovered object, designated GLASS-JWST-BD1, turned out to be about 31 times more massive than Jupiter. The discovery was detailed in an article published July 29 on arXiv.org.
Brown dwarfs are intermediate objects between planets and stars. Astronomers generally agree that these are substellar objects, with masses ranging from 13 to 80 Jupiter masses.
T dwarfs are a class of brown dwarfs with effective temperatures between 500 and 1500 K. They are the coldest and least luminous substellar objects discovered so far.
Although many brown dwarfs have been discovered to date, T dwarfs are not very common, with only about 400 such objects identified so far.
The discovery of the new T-dwarf was made as part of the Through the Looking-Glass (GLASS-JWST) project of the JWST Early Release Science (ERS) program, aimed at studying the massive galaxy cluster Abell 2744.
Panchromatic coverage of 0.9-4.5 microns of the spectral energy distribution,” the scientists write in the article.
According to the study, GLASS-JWST-BD1 has a mass of about 31.43 Jupiter masses and an effective temperature of about 600 K. This brown dwarf is estimated to be 5 billion years old.
Comparison with theoretical models suggests that GLASS-JWST-BD1 is a late-type T-dwarf. The new object is located at a distance of 1,850 to 2,350 light-years from Earth in a direction perpendicular to the plane of the Milky Way. The results indicate that this object is likely part of a halo.
Astronomers noted that further observations of GLASS-JWST-BD1 are needed to confirm its T-dwarf nature.
The authors of the article emphasized that their discovery demonstrates the ability of JWST to explore distant low-mass galactic stellar and substellar objects.
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