An Abnormally Red Brown Dwarf

On February 5th, a team of astronomers from the University of Hertfordshire, England, published a paper about the discovery of an "extremely red L dwarf". 

A brown dwarf is a star that cannot sustain hydrogen fusion in their cores and thus are usually extremely small and cold compared to most other stars.  The small size poses a problem for distinguishing between these substellar masses and planets. The L spectral class of brown dwarves are more reddish than the other classes.

The astronomers noticed this particular peculiar L dwarf from the United Kingdom Infrared Deep Sky Survey Large Area Survey and then used the VLT to attempt to determine why the star was so red.  Using some complicated sounding and probably/possibly clever techniques such as  "applying a de-reddening extinction curve to its spectrum" and not so complicated things such as "increasing optical depth", the team was able to determine that the cause of the redness is due to the composition of the star's atmosphere.  More specifically, they extrapolated that the colors of the brown dwarves will be determined by the thickness of the dust cloud.  While this may not be the most interesting topic in astronomy, findings like these help further model ultracool atmospheres in low temperature stars which are apparently not very well understood.

Source

An artist's interpretation of what an L dwarf might look like.

Kepler Telescope Functional Again

For the first time in a year, the Kepler telescope managed to observe a distant exoplanet today.  The Kepler telescope suffered a mechanical failure last year, losing its ability to stay stable.  The telescope found exoplanets by looking for eclipsing binary systems.  Since the planets are usually extremely small compared to the stars, the precision must be very high for the telescope to detect the dimming of the star from an eclipse and time how long the eclipse lasts.  The unsteadiness caused by the mechanical failure meant that the telescope could not reach the desired precision to carry out its mission.  But the smart people who worked on the Kepler team came up with an idea last year to use radiation pressure from the Sun to hold the telescope steady, which can last up to 75 days at a time.  The plan was put into action just this year and the telescope looked at a known exoplanet found by another telescope and confirmed its location.  This means that the radiation induced stability worked as planned and the telescope is functional once again.

Source