New Star in the Neighborhood

tachyonflow writes "Well, it's probably been around for a while, but it's new to us. The Sydney Morning Herald is reporting that astronomers have discovered a new star only 7.8 light-years from our sun. It's a red dwarf that's not visible to the naked eye from earth. I guess it's time to update those Celestia databases..."

Comments

Re:It's not a "new star"

[httptech]

Not that I posted this story two hours before, only to have it rejected... *sigh*

There's often a delay of a few hours between a submission's approval and its posting, so you probably were just not the first submission. I posted a story and had it almost immediately rejected, then saw the same story posted the next day. Turns out the submitter had sent it in an hour and a half ahead of me, but it wasn't posted for 18 hours. So don't be too bummed out about it.

Better Info

[kalidasa]

ApJ Letters Submission on arxiv

Re:worth a closer look

[PeterClark]

Excellent. Finding one of these is worth zillions of galaxies, quasars, and the like.

Even if it doesn't have liquid water, gasious oxygen, or solid land, then it can still focus as the fulcrum of our local jump point.

Surely you jest. Local? Pray tell, how is 7.8 lightyears local? Well, on a galactic scale, it may be local, but from the viewpoint of space travel, it's probably further than we'll ever get, at least for another couple generations, and that's assuming we get lucky. Alpha Centauri is roughly a little more than half that distance. The article includes a rather nice little diagram illustrating the three nearest stars (although it's rather misleading to make Sol so large, but hey, what can you do?) So for a gravity-assisted swing-by, this is definitely out of the question for a good long time.

Re:Red, or brown?

[JetJaguar]

Well, it is very near the low mass cut-off. The minimum mass required to fuse helium is right around 0.07. So yeah, it's possible for it to be a main sequence star, barely.