A great result has come out of UKIDSS, the IR survey of which I am overall PI, led by Steve Warren and Daniel Mortlock at Imperial. This is the discovery of the coldest star found so far – a brown dwarf with the telephone number ULAS J0034-00. We hope this is just the tip of the iceberg with UKIDSS, and are hoping to find a whole new population of super cool/old/small substellar objects. We have already decided what to call them even though we haven’t found them yet – Y dwarfs.
A press release has been put out to coincide with the AAS meeting. I am about umpteenth on the paper. Brown dwarfs are not really my speciality, but I find them fascinating. Not so my partner Deb it seems. I mentioned the result and she mocked. “You mean you are boasting about finding something especially dim and feeble ? How dull is that ? What happened to dark energy and hypernovae ?”
So I tried explaining to the kids but they was too busy revising Chemistry or killing monsters on the Playstation or something.
Well I still think its interesting.
(p.s. I see Fraser Cain picked this one up at Universe Today)
Posted by andyxl 
The e-Astronomer 