English

Flux and Color of WISE 0855-0714

Solar and Stellar Astrophysics 2025-05-27 v2

Abstract

WISE 0855-0714 is the coldest known brown dwarf, located 2.28 pc from the solar system. Discovered by the Wide-Field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE) in 2014 (Luhman 2014), the object is of interest to scientists because of its low temperature (270\approx270 K), proximity to the solar system, small mass (310MJ\sim3-10\: M_{J}), and high proper motion. The first observations of W0855 by WISE in 2010 are heavily contaminated by a background source. With 10.5 years of observations following the NEOWISE reactivation in 2013 (Mainzer et al., 2014), we present a robust analysis of W0855's flux and color unobstructed by this background source. We obtain W1 = 19.3 and W1-W2 = 5.4 magnitudes with an error of 0.37 magnitudes.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2505.12105,
  title  = {Flux and Color of WISE 0855-0714},
  author = {Edward L. Wright and Jack Foley},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2505.12105},
  year   = {2025}
}

Comments

7 pages, 5 figures. v2 adds the author E-mail and fixes some wording