Teide 1


Teide 1 was the first brown dwarf to be verified, in 1995. It is located in the Pleiades open star cluster, approximately from Earth.
This object is more massive than a planet, but less massive than a star. The radius of the brown dwarf is four times that of Jupiter. Its surface temperature is 2,600 ± 150 K, which is about half that of the Sun. Its luminosity is 0.08–0.05% of that of the Sun. Its age is only 120 million years compared to the Sun's age of 4.68 billion years.

Discovery

Teide 1 is detected by Rafael Rebolo López, María R. Zapatero-Osorio and Eduardo L. Martín on optical images obtained, in January 1994, with the 0.80 meter diameter telescope from the Institut d ' Canary astrophysics located at the Teide Observatory on the island of Tenerife. Its cold nature was confirmed in December 1994 with the William Herschel telescope of the Roque de los Muchachos observatory in La Palma. It is then the coldest of the known objects. On May 22, 1995, the article reporting his discovery was submitted to the journal Nature, which published it on September 14, 1995. Meanwhile, a similar object, Calar 3, was discovered. The brown dwarf nature of Teide 1 and Calar 3 was confirmed in 1996 following spectroscopic observations with the 10-meter diameter telescope of the W. M. Keck observatory of Mauna Kea on the island of Hawaii.

Characteristics

Teide 1 is a brown dwarf of spectral type M8 whose luminosity is approximately -3.24 ± 0.04 dex and the effective temperature is approximately 2 584 ± 100 K. Its mass is approximately 0.052 solar mass.
It is barely 120 million years old, and its surface temperature is estimated at around 2,600 Kelvin.

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