ASTRONOMERS are flummoxed by a mysterious object circling a faint star some 300 light years away from Earth.
The light from the compact object indicates that its surface temperature is around 1500 °C, suggesting it is a cold, slow-burning star of a kind known as a brown dwarf. But analysis of its infrared emissions show it is missing certain key molecules found in brown dwarfs, such as methane and carbon monoxide. “We still don’t know what we are looking at,” says team member Tom Harrison from New Mexico State University in Las Cruces.
His colleague Steve Howell of the National…
