We normally think of stars as hot - but scientists using ESO's Very large telescope say they've found a pair of cool brown dwarfs, one of which is no hotter than a sauna or a cup of tea.

Indeed, says the team, it may be so cool that it actually has water-based clouds.

In fact, brown dwarfs are essentially failed stars, in that they lack enough mass for gravity to trigger nuclear reactions.

With April approaching, my thoughts turn more and more to the release of the WISE data, which should tell us a great deal about brown dwarfs and other relatively cool objects in our stellar neighborhood. The Wide-Field Infrared Explorer mission hasn’t gained the media attention of a Kepler or a CoRoT because it’s not specifically a planet-hunter and isn’t in the business of turning up small, rocky worlds. But if you’ve been following our discussions here, you know how important a mission this is. We’ll get a bit more than half the data WISE has generated in April, and the rest of the dataset in 2012, by which time we may be able to identify, or else lay to rest the idea of, a gas giant (‘Tyche’) at 15000 AU, or a brown dwarf closer than Alpha Centauri...............