New Candidate for "Coldest Star" is Same Temperature as a Hot Cup of Coffee

There is a new candidate for coldest known star: a brown dwarf with about the same temperature as a hot cup of coffee. That’s cool enough to begin crossing the blurry line between small cold stars and big hot planets.

Brown dwarfs are essentially failed stars: they lack the mass and gravity to trigger the nuclear reactions that make stars shine brightly. The newly discovered brown dwarf, identified as CFBDSIR 1458+10B, is the smaller and dimmer member of a binary brown dwarf system located just 75 light-years from Earth. The pair was discovered by astronomers using the W. M. Keck Observatory and the Canada-France-Hawai'i Telescope, both on the summit of Mauna Kea in Hawaiii, following up on earlier work done at European Southern Observatory's Very Large Telescope in Chile.
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