A brown dwarf found hiding 75 light-years from Earth is the coldest and dimmest ever discovered, a new study reports. It may represent a new class of failed stars straddling the division between stars and Jupiter-like planets.

A warmer and brighter companion originally obscured the brown dwarf, named CFBDSIR J1458+1013B, until astronomers used telescopes powerful enough to discern it. It’s four to five times dimmer and 130 degrees cooler than previous record-holders, with a surface temperature of about 100 degrees Celsius — comparable to a cup of hot tea.

“At such temperatures we expect the brown dwarf to have properties that are different from previously known brown dwarfs and much closer to those of giant exoplanets,” said astronomer Michael Liu of the University of Hawaii in a press release. “It could even have water clouds in its atmosphere.”

Brown dwarfs are balls of warm gas that lack the mass necessary to fuse hydrogen at their core, as stars can. Fusion within the sun, for example, has made that star burn for more than 4.5 billion years, and given it a surface temperature around 5,500 degrees Celsius.

What separates brown dwarfs from huge planets is still fuzzy, but a recent study suggests gaseous objects at least 13 times more massive than Jupiter are not planets because they’re heavy enough to stay warm by occasionally fusing deuterium.

CFBDSIR J1458+1013B may be the first evidence of a new type of brown dwarf, called a “Y spectral” object, that more closely resembles a planet than any other type of brown dwarf. Computer models characterized them with unusually cool temperatures, low brightness and atypical color. CFBDSIR J1458+1013B is bluer than such models predict it should be.

Liu and others describe CFBDSIR J1458+1013B in a study on arXiv.org. It was first identified by astronomers at the Keck II and Canada-France-Hawaii telescopes, and researchers at the European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope measured its ultra-low temperature.

However, CFBDSIR J1458+1013B’s record-holding days may already be numbered. The Spitzer Space Telescope is equipped to find similarly cool objects and recently spotted two that await precise temperature measurements.

Video: A small failed star has taken the record for the coldest and dimmest ever detected. The brown dwarf didn’t have enough mass to ignite into a blaze and has a surface temperature comparable to a cup of tea./ESO/A. Fujii/Digitized Sky Survey (music by John Dyson from the album Moonwind)

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