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Brown Dwarf Backyardigans

Sept. 5, 2013
The locations of brown dwarfs discovered by NASA's Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer, or WISE, and mapped by NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope, are shown in this diagram as red circles.

The locations of brown dwarfs discovered by NASA's Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer, or WISE, and mapped by NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope, are shown in this diagram as red circles. The red lines all link back to the location of the sun.

The view is from a vantage point about 100 light-years away from the sun, looking back toward the constellation Orion. At this distance, our sun is barely visible as a speck of light. The vastly fainter brown dwarfs would not even be visible in this view.

NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif., manages the Spitzer Space Telescope mission for NASA's Science Mission Directorate, Washington. Science operations are conducted at the Spitzer Science Center at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena. Data are archived at the Infrared Science Archive housed at the Infrared Processing and Analysis Center at Caltech. Caltech manages JPL for NASA.

For more information about Spitzer, visit http://spitzer.caltech.edu and http://www.nasa.gov/spitzer.

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