It is the fourth-closest star or (sub-) brown dwarf system to the Sun and was discovered by Kevin Luhman in 2013 using data from the Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE).

[6] It was later discovered by Kevin Luhman in March 2013, who noticed the object's unusually high proper motion while searching for potential binary companions of the Sun in WISE images.

[8] Based on direct observations, WISE 0855−0714 has a large parallax of 439.0±2.4 mas, which corresponds to a distance of around 2.28±0.01 parsecs (7.43±0.04 light-years).

WISE 0855−0714 also has an exceptionally high proper motion of 8,151.6±1.8 mas/yr,[2] the third-highest after Barnard's Star (10,300 mas/yr) and Kapteyn's Star (8,600 mas/yr)[6] Its luminosity in different bands of the thermal infrared in combination with its absolute magnitude—because of its known distance—was used to place it in context of different models; the best characterization of its brightness was in the W2 band of 4.6 μm at an apparent magnitude of 13.89±0.05, though it was brighter into the deeper infrared.

[11] Near- and mid-infrared spectra in the L- and M-band were taken with the GNIRS instrument on the Gemini North Telescope.

[12][13] An approved JWST proposal describes how the team is planning to use a near-infrared time-series to study the hydrological cycle in the atmosphere of WISE 0855 with NIRSpec.

This could mean that WISE 0855 formed from a younger cloud, but more measurements of 15N in other brown dwarfs are needed to establish evolutionary trends.

[15] In November 2024 a team used archived and new NIRSpec data to detect deuterated methane (CH3D) and about one part per billion PH3 in WISE 0855.

The light curve is too irregular to produce a good fit and rotation periods between 9.7 and 14 hours were measured.

[6] Assuming an age range of 1–10 billion years, evolutionary models for brown dwarfs predict that WISE 0855−0714 should have a mass between 3 to 10 MJup.

As of 2003, the International Astronomical Union considers an object with a mass above 13 MJup, capable of fusing deuterium, to be a brown dwarf.