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New Star in the Neighborhood

Posted by michael on from the drop-by-for-a-visit dept.

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..."

3 of 39 comments (clear)

  1. It's not a "new star" by Mensa+Babe · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Well, it's not exactly a new star, in a sense that it was formed recently. It is just a recently discoverd, but a very old star. The Slashdot summary is somewhat misleading, but the article is very interesting, I highly recommend reading it. Not that I posted this story two hours before, only to have it rejected... *sigh*

    --
    Karma: Positive (probably because of superiour intellect)
  2. Nemesis anyone? by RalphBNumbers · · Score: 2, Interesting

    I just started reading Nemesis by Isaac Asimov last night.

    The book starts with the discovery of a neighbor star, later named Nemesis. It is a Red Dwarf, and closer to Earth than Alpha Centuari. It is also dimmer than one would expect because of a dust cloud between it and the solar system.

    Now how's that for coincidence?

    --
    "The worst tyrannies were the ones where a governance required its own logic on every embedded node." - Vernor Vinge
  3. Re:worth a closer look by js7a · · Score: 2, Interesting
    how is 7.8 lightyears local?

    It's local if you're headed in that direction. Alpha Centari, Barnard's, and Wolf 359 are all on the same side.

    Also, for gravity assist, it's not the size of the mass that matters so much as its relative motion.

    it's rather misleading to make Sol so large, but hey, what can you do?

    Solstation has a nice 3-D star map Java applet.