TW Hydrae Family of Stars

A sky map taken by NASA's Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer, or WISE, shows the location of the TW Hydrae family, or association, of stars, which lies about 175 light-years from Earth and is centered in the Hydra constellation. The stars are thought to have formed together around 10 million years ago. Recently, data from WISE and its predecessor, the Two Micron All Sky Survey, or 2MASS, found the lowest-mass free-floating object in this family -- a likely brown dwarf called WISEA J114724.10-204021.3.

NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, managed and operated WISE for NASA's Science Mission Directorate in Washington. The spacecraft was put into hibernation mode in 2011, after it scanned the entire sky twice, completing its main objectives. In September 2013, WISE was reactivated, renamed NEOWISE and assigned a new mission to assist NASA's efforts to identify potentially hazardous near-Earth objects. The 2MASS mission was a joint effort between the California Institute of Technology, Pasadena; the University of Massachusetts, Amherst; and JPL. Caltech manages JPL for NASA. WISE, NEOWISE and 2MASS data are archived at the Infrared Processing and Analysis Center, or IPAC, at Caltech.

More information is online at http://www.nasa.gov/wise and http://wise.astro.ucla.edu and http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/wise.