![]() VVV BD001 was discovered by chance during this survey. It is performing six separate surveys of the sky, and the VVV (VISTA Variables in the Via Lactea) survey is designed to catalogue a billion objects in the centre of our own Milky Way galaxy. VISTA (the Visible and Infrared Survey Telescope for Astronomy) is the world’s largest survey telescope and is located at ESO’s Paranal Observatory in Chile. Astronomers generally look for these objects using near and mid-infrared cameras and special telescopes that are sensitive to these very cool objects, but usually avoid looking in very crowded regions of space - such as the central region of our galaxy, for example. Because of this they are much cooler and produce far less light, making them harder to find. Secondly, it belongs to an unusual class of stars known as “unusually blue brown dwarfs” - it is still unclear why these stars are bluer than expected.īrown dwarfs are born in the same way as stars, but do not have enough mass to trigger the burning of hydrogen to become normal stars. This dwarf is peculiar in two ways firstly, it is the first one found towards the centre of our Milky Way, one of the most crowded regions of the sky. They are often referred to as “failed stars” they are larger in size than planets like Jupiter, but smaller than stars. ![]() VVV BD001 is located about 55 light-years away from us, towards the very crowded centre of our galaxy.īrown dwarfs are stars that never quite managed to grow up into a star like our Sun. It is the first new brown dwarf spotted in our cosmic neighbourhood as part of the VVV Survey. ![]() This new image, from ESO’s VISTA telescope, shows a newly-discovered brown dwarf nicknamed VVV BD001, which is located at the very centre of this zoomable image.
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