By Ron Cowen
The solar system is surrounded by a bunch of abject failures, a new discovery suggests. Astronomers have found the nearest known brown dwarf, or failed star, residing about 9 light-years from Earth.
![](https://i0.wp.com/www.sciencenews.org/wp-content/uploads/2010/04/12234.jpg?resize=300%2C203&ssl=1)
That places this brown dwarf among the 10 closest stellar or substellar systems to the solar system, researchers report in an article posted online April 5 (http://arxiv.org/abs/1004.0317). Its temperature, about baking temp in a home oven, makes it the coolest brown dwarf known.
“Everyone is going to want to jump on this finding,” comments brown dwarf observer J. Davy Kirkpatrick of Caltech, who was not part of the discovery team. “I wouldn’t be surprised if someone started looking at it” the night the paper came out, he adds.
Astronomers calculate, based on the percentage of stars that fail to develop in young star clusters, that brown dwarfs should be at least as common in the Milky Way as stars. The new finding, combined with recent discoveries of other nearby brown dwarfs, suggests that the solar neighborhood is rife with these dim, hard-to-detect bodies. Indeed, the nearest body to the solar system may be a brown dwarf rather than a bona fide star, comments theorist Gibor Basri of the University of California, Berkeley.