A new faint, far-off, and cold brown dwarf has been discovered by a global team of astronomers using the James Webb Space Telescope's (JWST) new data.
The recently discovered object, known as GLASS-JWST-BD1, is found to be around 31 times as large as Jupiter. The discovery was described in a paper posted on arXiv.org on July 29 and reported first by Phys.
In Between Stars and Planets
Brown dwarfs are objects that stand in between stars and planets. They are substellar objects with masses between 13 and 80 Jupiter masses, according to most astronomers.
The coolest and least luminous substellar objects discovered so far are T dwarfs, a subclass of brown dwarfs with temperatures between 500 and 1,500 K, according to Phys.
Astronomers' understanding of objects close to the contentious planet/star border, including massive exoplanets, may be improved by studying T dwarfs. Although there have been several discoveries of brown dwarfs to date, there have only been 400 discoveries of T dwarfs.
A new brown dwarf, most likely belonging to the T dwarf subclass, has been discovered, thanks to a team of astronomers headed by Mario Nonino of the Astronomical Observatory of Trieste in Italy.
The finding was made as part of the Through the Looking GLASS (GLASS-JWST) project, a JWST Early Release Science (ERS) initiative targeting the enormous galaxy cluster Abell 2744 with JWST's Near-Infrared Spectrograph (NIRSPEC), Near-Infrared Imager, and Slitless Spectrograph (NIRISS).
The study calculates the effective temperature of GLASS-JWST-BD1 to be at 600 K and its mass to be around 31.43 Jupiter masses. The age of this brown dwarf is estimated to be 5 billion years.
Compared with theoretical models, GLASS-JWST-BD1 might be a late-type T dwarf. It was discovered to be between 1,850 and 2,350 light-years away when measured perpendicular to the galactic plane.
Read also: Brown Dwarf Nicknamed 'The Accident' Discovered by Citizen Scientist Using Data from NASA's NEOWISE
Confirming The Power of JWST
According to the findings, this object is presumably a thick disc or halo object that is part of the galactic population. The astronomers emphasized that additional observations of GLASS-JWST-BD1 are needed to validate its status as a T-dwarf. To learn more about the characteristics of this object, kinematic or chemical abundance data are required.
The discovery highlights the JWST's capability to study distant low-mass Galactic stellar and substellar objects, according to the paper's authors.
"The large estimated distance of GLASS-JWST-BD1 confirms the power of JWST to probe the very low-mass end of the stellar and substellar mass function in the Galactic thick disk and halo, enabling exploration of metallicity dependence on low-mass star formation and the evolution of brown dwarf atmospheres," the researchers wrote in the paper.
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Written by Joaquin Victor Tacla
