Here's an unusual record broken: astronomers have found the dimmest stars ever!
Adam Burgasser (and old friend and colleague, married to an old friend too; hi Gen!) led a team at MIT that found the dim bulbs. They are brown dwarfs, objects with too much mass to be considered planets but too low mass to maintain hydrogen fusion in their cores like normal stars. Some people call them "failed stars", but I don't like that. Maybe they're just overachieving planets. Adam's team observed the brown dwarf 2MASS J09393548-2448279 (which they call 2M0939 for short), which lies about 17 light years away. They used Spitzer Space Telescope to get spectra of the star, which allowed them to get its temperature as well as its chemical composition. They found a temperature of about 600K (330 C or 620 F), making this the coolest brown dwarf ever discovered! However, they had a mystery ...
