Star is discovered to be a close neighbor of the Sun and the coldest of its kind

(Phys.org) --A "brown dwarf" star that appears to be the coldest of its kind--as frosty as Earth's North Pole--has been discovered by a Penn State University astronomer using NASA's Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE) and Spitzer Space Telescopes. Images from the space telescopes also pinpointed the object's distance at 7.2 light-years away, making it the fourth closest system to our Sun.