A team of astronomers has discovered a bizarre new deep-space body out in our Milky Way’s interstellar space that has them intrigued. The team has named this celestial object “The Accident.”
The Accident is similar to a brown dwarf, which is a type of space object that has a mass between the largest planets and the tiniest stars but isn’t massive enough to trigger the fusion reactions that give the stars their high luminosity.
Very different from brown dwarfs
The uniqueness of the new discovery is the fact that brown dwarfs are usually young – but the Caltech-led research team that discovered The Accident calculates that it is around 10-13 billion years old.
The study has been published in The Astrophysical Journal Letters and points at a whole new category of a celestial body that was completely unknown until now. The Accident earned its name because the scientists found it accidentally, as per NASA’s press release.
It’s different enough for other brown dwarfs that it got screened out of the sort of surveys that revealed the other 2,000 brown dwarfs that are known to exist in our galaxy.
A surprising discovery
In some ways, The Accident – which has a scientific name of WISEA J153429.75-104303.3 — matches the dim of a brown dwarf. But it burns brighter in other wavelengths, setting it apart.
“This object defied all our expectations,” said Davy Kirkpatrick, lead study author, and Caltech astrophysicist. This data suggests that The Accident is both cold and hot, which ultimately hints that it’s twice as old as the typical brown dwarf and was formed when the galaxy had a very different chemical composition.
“It’s not a surprise to find a brown dwarf this old, but it is a surprise to find one in our backyard,” study co-author and Caltech astrophysicist Federico Marocco said in the release. “We expected that brown dwarfs this old exist, but we also expected them to be incredibly rare. The chance of finding one so close to the solar system could be a lucky coincidence, or it tells us that they’re more common than we thought.”
