Bizarre object hotter than the sun is orbiting a distant star at breakneck speed

An illustration of a brown dwarf, a planet larger than Jupiter and massive enough to fuse atoms in its core

A weird, super-hot celestial body  is breaking records and challenging astronomers' understanding of the boundary between stars and planets. 

The object, called WD0032-317B, is a brown dwarf — a type of bright, gaseous "protostar". Brown dwarves typically have a similar atmospheric composition to Jupiter but are 13 to 80 times larger. At that mass, these objects begin to fuse hydrogen isotopes in their cores. However, they aren't quite massive enough to spark the kind of full self-sustaining stellar fusion that powers stars like our sun — think of smoldering charcoal rather than a lit wood-fired oven.