Teide 1, also called Ted 1, is a brown dwarf located approximately 430 light years (130 parsecs) away from Earth in the Pleiades constellation. It was discovered in 1994, and became the first brown dwarf to be verified in 1995. It is a very faint object which has an apparent magnitude of 17.76 and an absolute magnitude of 12.38.
The mass of the object is 55 ± 15 Jupiter masses, significantly larger than that of a planet but also much smaller than that of a star (being ~0.052 Solar masses). The radius of the brown dwarf is around the same as Jupiter. Its surface temperature is ~2600 K (2326 °C; 4220 °F), about half that of the Sun. Its luminosity is only 0.1% that of the Sun's, meaning that the total luminosity radiated by Teide 1 in 6 months is equivalent to that of the Sun in 4 hours. The age of Teide 1 is around 120 million years.
Discovery[]
Teide 1 was first discovered by Rafael Rebolo López, María R. Zapatero-Osorio, and Eduardo L. Martín in optical images obtained in January 1994 with the 0.80 meter diameter telescope (IAC-80) from the Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias located at the Teide Observatory. Its cold nature was confirmed with the William Herschel Telescope in December 1994. The article reporting its discovery was submitted to Nature on May 22, 1995, and was published on September 14, 1995. During this time, a similar object, Calar 3, was discovered. The brown dwarf nature of Teide 1 and Calar 3 was confirmed in 1996 following spectroscopic observations with the 10-meter diameter telescope of the W. M. Keck observatory of Mauna Kea on the island of Hawaii.