Newly-Discovered Star may be Third-Closest

spaceref.com ^ | 21 May 03 | staff

[RightWhale]

Third closest star system or fifth closest star.

[Taiwan Bocks]

So this is not Wormwood, a.k.a. Planet X?

The one coming on a collision course with Earth?

[Lazamataz]

So we cannot even see the NEARBY stuff???? It took this long to find this one????

What, it's a mini-star?

[rudypoot]

"NASA's Near Earth Asteroid Tracking program..."

I think NASA's neat.

[dirtboy]

What, it's a mini-star?

[LTCJ]

"SO25300.5+165258," is a faint red dwarf

Let me guess,
"SO25300.5+165258" is Lebanese for "Helen Thomas".

Well, it fits the substitution test.

[RightWhale]

we cannot even see the NEARBY stuff????

That's right, we don't know Jacques.

[RightWhale]

Planet X

No, this is real science.

[MikeD]

Bump for later reading

[Darksheare]

I remember a few years back some astronomer smugly stating that we had mapped everything within a couple lightyears and there couldn't possibly be anything left out there nearby to find.

*chuckle*
Come to think of it, I haven't seen any articles referencing the guy since then.

(The article had been a 'posit' piece about "What if the Sun DID have a binary neighbor. The "Nemesis" hypothesis dealing with the oort cloud and how it gets disrupted. Someone else had said, "If the sun does have a binary neighbor, it'd have to be d@mned dim.")

[RightWhale]

The biggest surprise would be that there aren't any more surprises out there. They are still finding moons of Jupiter at this late date. Do we really know much at all about our own neighborhood?

[Mr. K]

No the planet that is on a collision course with earth is Nibiru- home of the Anu-Naki

[RightWhale]

Gotta luv that Coast2Coast creating a delightful alternate reality. Too bad they are all Libertarians and/or Gaians. Every one.

[farmfriend]

ping

[MikeD]

The biggest surprise would be that there aren't any more surprises out there. They are still finding moons of Jupiter at this late date. Do we really know much at all about our own neighborhood?

Amen, brother. We don't even have UV spectra of Mercury yet, and won't until at least January. Mercury's just down the road. Heck, we haven't done much science with the far side of the Moon yet...

MD

[Darksheare]

I know.
That's why I was so amused at that one guy stating that we'd found all our closest neighbors.

And we still haven't sent anything to check out Pluto yet.
Might be some interesting surprises out on that hunk of ice.

Personally, I wouldn't be surprised to find that we live in a rather odd binary star system.
But I rather doubt the UFO types insistence that there's aliens living on a planet circling it and bebothering us every three thousand years.
'Course- the implications of what I'm saying, the binary system deal, are that the sun would have to have a neighbor that is a brown dwarf or similarly dim odject for us to have not seen it yet.
Like the article mentioned star.
Rather oddly dim for a red dwarf.

[Darksheare]

Crud, I coin a term and then miss-spell it.
"Oddject"
An object of bizarre existence or description.
The act or happenstance of being bizarre.
See Al Gore.

[petuniasevan]

Although the star resembles a M6.5 red dwarf, it actually appears three times dimmer than expected for this kind of star at the initial distance estimate of 7.8 light-years

There's a lot of joking going on, but hey, finding a little dim red dwarf nearby is harder than one would think. How does one notice a barely noticeable star? One way is the method used by Clyde Tombaugh to find Pluto (that's right, he already knew it had to be there). You photograph a certain area of the sky. Repeat the process later. In the case of Pluto, a few nights' spread showed the planet had moved against the background of stars.

Now a star, even a relatively close one, isn't going to show a lot of movement against the background. The images to compare will have to be taken months (for parallax) to years (for proper motion) apart. The change in position would be minor.

Another possibility is that the star is not underluminous and close but normal for its class and 3 times farther away. This is possible if it has a large proper motion. The star Aldebaran, for instance, is flying by our celestial neighborhood as a "loose" Population II (globular cluster type) star. A spectral study should indicate whether this star is Pop II. Even if it's not, it still could have been ejected from an open star cluster or even have originated in a dwarf galaxy that our own Milky Way has incorporated.

[petuniasevan]

And we still haven't sent anything to check out Pluto yet. Might be some interesting surprises out on that hunk of ice

In the works.

New Horizons:A Pluto/Kuiper Belt Mission

[biblewonk]

I remember a few years back some astronomer smugly stating that we had mapped everything within a couple lightyears and there couldn't possibly be anything left out there nearby to find.

The sun is the only star within a couple lightyears. Are you sure it was an astronomer?