WISE finds Y dwarfs

[Kullat Nunu]

NASA'S Wise Mission Discovers Coolest Class of Stars

Summary: A total of 100 brown dwarfs found so far, of which six are potential Y dwarfs (theoretized ultra-cool brown dwarfs). The coldest is WISE 1828+2650 with surface temperature of 25C! Another one, WISE 1541-2250, is located mere 9 light years away, so it could become the seventh closest known star(?) system.

[SagittariusAStar]

In March, an 80-degree F (25 C) brown dwarf was reported: http://KenCroswell.com/CoolBrownDwarf.html .

[Kullat Nunu]

Hmm... the WISE article actually reads "less than... 25C/80F" (room temperature).

[kzb]

Pre-print now available

The First Hundred Brown Dwarfs Discovered by the Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE)
Kirkpatrick et al
http://arxiv.org/abs/1108.4677

In this paper, one of the most interesting bits starts on page 28:

..... data cover less than 75% of the entire sky. Also none of the sky has been coadded to
its full depth using all available frames and the detection threshold for first-pass processing
was set higher, in units of signal-to-noise ratio, than it will be for final processing. The latter
points are particularly important as they will, in the future, enable more robust colors or
color limits for potential Y dwarf candidates. Moreover, we have followed up less than 50%
of the brown dwarf candidates already culled from sections of the sky for which we have
access. Thus, we believe that our current space density estimates are gross underestimates.

(Emphasis is mine)

So I take this to mean there is still a chance of that elusive "brown dwarf closer than Proxima"