At last: The coldest ever brown dwarf, right, was found hiding beside a brighter star 75m light years away
Scientists were this week amazed after the discovery of space's dimmest and coldest star - with a temperature the same as a cup of tea.
The two brown dwarf stars stunned astronomers when they were spotted through a set of three high-powered telescopes.
Both of them are about the same size as Jupiter but the smaller, more distant, star has a surface temperature of around 100 degrees.
The incredibly cool temperature - the same as a freshly boiled cup of tea - makes it the coldest one in the night sky.
A warmer and brighter companion had originally obscured the brown dwarf which has been named CFBDSIR J1458+1013B.
But with new, more powerful telescopes, astronomers were able to see the star, which is almost five times dimmer and 130 degrees cooler than the previous record.
The brown dwarf may represent a new class of cosmic objects straddling the division between stars and planets.
'We were very excited to see that this object had such a low temperature, but we couldn't have guessed that it would turn out to be a double system and have an even more interesting, even colder component,' said star-gazer Philippe Delorme of the Institut de planétologie et d'astrophysique de Grenoble which studied the brown dwarf.