Brown Dwarf Companion to Epsilon Indi

silent lurker writes "A team of European astronomers has discovered a Brown Dwarf object (a 'failed' star) less than 12 light-years from the Sun. It is the nearest yet known. Now designated Epsilon Indi B, it is a companion to a well-known bright star in the southern sky, Epsilon Indi (now "Epsilon Indi A"), previously thought to be single. The binary system is one of the twenty nearest stellar systems to the Sun. ...and astronomers believe there might be as many as 12x as many brown dwarf stars as there are visible ones! Hmmmm... Lots o' juicy fodder for SF content creators, dontcha think? ...not to mention astronomers themselves. See press release from European Southern Observatory. Another item is from Science Daily."

Comments

I've been there and I didnt see one.

[brejc8]

Well in Elite anyway.
Ah well... Lonely life.

Need a better name!

[MonTemplar]

from the article :

• 
  Brown dwarfs are thought to form in much the same way as stars, by the gravitational collapse of clumps of cold gas and dust in dense molecular clouds. However, for reasons not yet entirely clear, some clumps end up with masses less than about 7.5% of that of our Sun, or 75 times the mass of planet Jupiter. Below that boundary, there is not enough pressure in the core to initiate nuclear hydrogen fusion, the long-lasting and stable source of power for ordinary stars like the Sun. Except for a brief early phase where some deuterium is burned, these low-mass objects simply continue to cool and fade slowly away while releasing the heat left-over from their birth.
  

Troll Stars, anyone? :)

Astrophysics 101

[barakn]

Some back-of-the-envelope calculations using some crude rules-of-thumb: Stars roughly follow a mass-luminosity relationship. L / Lsun=(M / Msun)^2.3 (for M.5*Msun). An estimate for this object indicates it should be .0007 times as luminous as the sun. Actually, due to the lack of fusion, it is only .00002 times as bright. Also, from Wien's displacement law (lamda_max*T = .290 cm K) and the object's estimated surface temperature of 1273 K, it's peak radiation occurs at a wavelength of 2280 nm, far into the infrared. The bulk of what little light brown dwarves emit is emitted in the infrared, making them practically invisible without a very expensive (and new) telescope. This has led to speculation that an unnoticed brown dwarf (the infamous Nemesis) could be orbiting our own sun!

Re:Astrophysics 101

[barakn]

UKIRT has had a series of upgrades starting in about 1990, including several generations of IR imagers, the addition of active optics, etc.. Thus the modern version of UKIRT is not 23 years old. Nor is 23 years particularly old compared to the ~400 years that telescopic observations have been made. If you read the fine print, you'll note that it took collaborative observations by 5 different telescopes to merely confirm that brown dwarfs vary in brightness (differently at different colors). While it might confirm they have weather, it certainly does not "determine what kind of weather patterns their atmospheres have." A confirmed observation of a brown dwarf was not made until 1995 (reference).

You incensitive clods!

[GuyMannDude]

Brown dwarf? Good god! For those of you living in a cave, the proper ethnically-sensitive term is "Vertically-challenged African-American". How would you like someone to refer to you as "Whitey 4-eyes"? At least you guys had the sense to use the word "companion" rather than "hooker" although "escort" would also be acceptable.

Just because they don't spend their nights recompiling their Linux kernals doesn't make them any less of a person than you. Let's try to use modern terminology here, people!

GMD

Re:Ask the Tellurites...

[Anonymous Coward]

most of my Star Trek nerdophernalia is packed in a box somewhere.

Excellent. Identifying and isolating the problem are important first steps. Next is setting it on fire.

Good luck. And God's speed.