An object orbiting a star 1,400 light-years away seriously challenges our notions of what is possible in the universe. It’s a brown dwarf, a strange category of object between planets and stars, but it orbits so close to its very hot host star that its temperature exceeds an incredible 8,000 Kelvin (7,727 degrees Celsius or 13,940 degrees Fahrenheit) – hot enough. splitting the molecules in the atmosphere into their complex atoms.

This is much higher than the Sun’s surface temperature, which reaches a relatively pleasant temperature of 5,778 Kelvin. In fact, this brown dwarf is a temperature record holder – the hottest object of its kind we’ve ever found.

Although brown dwarfs are generally hotter than planets, they burn cooler than the coldest red dwarf stars – they have absolutely no way of reaching Sun-like temperatures in their fusion engines.

An international team led by astrophysicist Naama Hallakoon of the Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel named the object WD0032-317B. His discoveries are described in detail in a document accepted by him. Nature Astronomy and is currently available on the arXiv preprint server.

The team says the discovery could help us understand what happens to Jupiter-like gas giants orbiting extremely hot, massive stars, which can be difficult to observe due to properties such as stellar activity and rotational speed.

Planets orbiting close to their stars are irradiated with large amounts of ultraviolet light. This can cause their atmosphere to evaporate and break down the molecules within, a process known as thermal decomposition. However, we don’t know much about this extreme environment. At such close proximity to a very bright star, it can be difficult to distinguish signals from an orbiting exoplanet from stellar activity.

We know of an exoplanet hot enough for thermal weathering. KELT-9b orbits a blue supergiant star that heats the exoplanet’s day side to temperatures in excess of 4,600 Kelvin (4,327 degrees Celsius or 7,820 degrees Fahrenheit).

This is hotter than most stars – red dwarfs, the most common stars in the galaxy, have a maximum surface temperature of about 4,000 Kelvin.

However, one way to study these extreme regimes could be brown dwarfs in white dwarf binaries. White dwarfs are much, much smaller than blue supergiants like KELT-9, making them dimmer and making it easier to detect signals from overheated satellites.

A brown dwarf isn’t exactly a planet, but it’s not exactly a star either. A planet-like object with a mass of about 13 times that of Jupiter could have enough pressure and heat in its core to ignite deuterium fusion.

It is a “heavy” isotope of hydrogen; The temperature and pressure required for its synthesis are much lower than the temperature and pressure required for the synthesis of ordinary hydrogen burning in the cores of stars. Brown dwarfs can reach about 80 Jupiter masses and temperatures of about 2500 Kelvin. They are cooler and dimmer than red dwarfs, but glow in the infrared wavelength range. Source