New Planet Sized Object With Temperatures Similar To Earth Found

A discovery team lead by a man called Luham has just photographed the coldest object in space at the average temperature of a summer day in Arizona. It was formed in a similar way to a star, in a cloud of dust and gass. It is about nine times the size of Jupiter which makes it as big as a small star. Its surface temperature is between 27 and 71 degrees Celsius. It's called a brown dwarf because it was going to be a star but it waasn't big enough so it cooled down. Astronomers have named the brown dwarf "WD 0806-661 B" because it is the orbiting companion of an object named "WD 0806-661" -- the "white dwarf" core of a star that was like the Sun until its outer layers were expelled into space during the final phase of its evolution. "The distance of this white dwarf from the Sun is 63 light years, which is very near our solar system compared with most stars in our galaxy," Luhman said.



I find this information very interesting and I suspect that it's a very important developement for our future colonies, if we have any. Suppose our Earth is destroyed because of our pollution and we have nowhere else to go. If that were to happen we would all be prepared because we would have a new planet to travel to and live on. That is assuming that we actually invent a space rocket that can go faster than current ones because otherwise we would be looking at about a million years and countless human generations. We would also be looking at an enormous ship, big enough to house tens of billions of people. We are looking at some major design issues that we will need to solve or the human race might just end up dying out.


MLA Citation: Byrd, Deborah. "Planet-sized Object Has Temp like Arizona Summer Day | Space | EarthSky." EarthSky.org - A Clear Voice for Science. 21 Oct. 2011. Web. 29 Oct. 2011. <http://earthsky.org/space/planet-sized-object-has-temp-like-arizona-summer-day>.