Overview

• An international team led by Zenghua Zhang reports the discovery of UPM J1040−3551 AabBab about 82 light-years away in Antlia, publishing the results in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.
• Researchers linked the components using common proper motion from ESA’s Gaia and NASA’s WISE surveys, then used SOAR spectroscopy to confirm the stellar and substellar pairings.
• The brighter binary is two M-type red dwarfs at roughly 3,200 K with masses near 0.17 times the Sun each, while the fainter binary is a T7–T8 brown-dwarf pair at about 820 K and 690 K with estimated masses of 10–30 Jupiter masses.
• The two binaries are separated by 1,656 astronomical units, with each inner pair orbiting over decades and the wide mutual orbit exceeding 100,000 years in a stable hierarchical configuration.
• H-alpha emission indicates an age of roughly 300 million to 2 billion years, making this the first known quadruple featuring a T-type brown-dwarf pair and a key benchmark the team plans to refine with high-resolution imaging to obtain dynamical masses.