A team of scientists at the Carnegie Institution for Science have discovered the first evidence of water ice clouds outside the solar system.

Scientists discovered them on a nearby brown dwarf called W0855. At only 7 light-years away, it's the fourth-closest known system to our sun, according to space-news site EarthSky.

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First spotted by one of NASA’s orbiting infrared telescopes, the W0855 is somewhere between a gas-giant planet and a star, with surface temperatures around those found at Earth’s north pole, Examiner.com reported. It’s at least three times larger than Jupiter, but not big enough to begin nuclear fusion to become a star, according to Space.com.

The Carnegie team used an infrared telescope to observe W0855 from the ground, at the Las Campanas Observatory in Chile.

They compared infrared images of W0855 with models for predicting atmospheric content of brown dwarves, and found that it has "evidence of frozen clouds of sulfide and water," according to the Carnegie Institution for Science.

“Ice clouds are predicted to be very important in the atmospheres of planets beyond our solar system, but they've never been observed outside of it before now," lead scientist Jacqueline Faherty said.

The team published its findings on Tuesday in The Astrophysical Journal Letters.