HATFIELD, England, Feb. 1 (UPI) -- An international team of British-led astronomers says it has discovered what may be the coolest sub-stellar body ever found outside our own solar system.
The brown dwarf called SDSS1416+13B has a temperature of approximately 400 degrees Fahrenheit, NASA said. The space agency's Spitzer Space Telescope helped determine the temperature of the object by observing at a particular range of light called mid-infrared.
Too small to be stars, brown dwarfs are so-named to describe bodies that are cooler, fainter and redder than "red dwarf" stars, with the color brown representing the mix of red and black.
The discovery marked the fourth time in three years the United Kingdom Infrared Telescope in Hawaii has made a record-breaking discovery of the coolest known brown dwarf, said Philip Lucas of the University of Hertfordshire.
Lucas said what's excited astronomers are the object's very peculiar colors, which actually make it appear either very blue or very red, depending on which part of the spectrum is used to look at it.
"We have to be a bit careful about this one because its colors are so different than anything seen before that we don't really understand it yet," he added. "Even if it turns out that the low temperature is not quite record breaking, the colors are so extreme that this object will keep a lot of physicists busy trying to explain it."
