Researchers have found a freak in space. It’s a song hotter than the Sun, but it doesn’t fully meet the star’s characteristics.
Its surface temperature is up to 7,700 degrees Celsius, while the surface of our Sun has a temperature of about 5,500 degrees.
Named WD0032-317B, the object is the hottest so-called brown dwarf ever discovered.
Brown ones dwarfs are sometimes called failed stars because their mass is not large enough to sustain nuclear fusion in stars.
Because of this, they are also significantly cooler than stars like the Sun. So how can a body hotter than the Sun be a brown dwarf?
Unusually the secret of the high surface temperature turns on the companion of WD0032-317B.
The brown dwarf is not alone, but orbits a small but very hot white dwarf star.
The white dwarf star was named WD0032-317.
A white dwarf is created when a Sun-like star loses its outer layers and then collapses into a body about the size of the Earth, but extremely dense.
As a white dwarf, WD0032-317 is also small in mass, as its mass is about 40 percent of the mass of the Sun. Despite its small size, WD0032-317 is scorching hot: its surface has a temperature of nearly 37,000 degrees.
This is how the white dwarf also heats up its brown orbiter to record high readings.
WD0032-317B orbits its tiny parent star at breakneck speed, as one revolution takes only about 2.3 hours, it appears from the bulletin.
The orbit also passes very close to the parent star, and therefore the brown dwarf is locked in its orbit so that it always only reveals the same half of itself to the parent star.
The close union of the two dwarfs is exhausting for the wanderer. The strong radiation of the white dwarf causes the hydrogen on the surface of the brown dwarf to vaporize.
According to the team of researchers, the star system is an excellent research target, because not much is known yet about how hot stars vaporize their smaller orbiting counterparts.
Research appeared in Nature astronomy.
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