"WISE scanned the entire sky for these and other objects, and was able to spot their feeble light with its highly sensitive infrared vision," says Jon Morse, Astrophysics Division director at NASA Headquarters in Washington. WISE's infrared vision allowed the telescope to finally spot the faint glow of a half dozen Y dwarfs relatively close to our sun, within a distance of about 40 light-years. When viewed with a visible-light telescope, they are nearly impossible to see.
Īstronomers hunted these dark orbs for more than a decade without success. Y dwarfs are the coldest star-like bodies known, with temperatures that can be even cooler than the human body.
This artist's conception illustrates what a "Y dwarf" might look like.
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