There’s a bizarre object out in space that’s not a star and not a planet, but it’s hotter than the Sun! It’s called a “brown dwarf,” sometimes nicknamed a “failed star.” Brown dwarfs are too small to start nuclear fusion like real stars, but they’re much bigger and hotter than regular planets. One brown dwarf, called WD 0032-317B, is especially strange because it gets heated up by a nearby white dwarf (a super-hot leftover core of a dead star). This makes its atmosphere reach temperatures of over 14,000 degrees Fahrenheit, hotter than the surface of our Sun! It’s a wild example of how weird and surprising the universe can be.
