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NASA Discovers 7th Closest Star
Thorfinn.au says "Scientists using data from NASA's Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE) have discovered the coldest class of star-like bodies, with temperatures as cool as the human body. Astronomers hunted these dark orbs, termed Y dwarfs, for more than a decade without success. When viewed with a visible-light telescope, they are nearly impossible to see. WISE's infrared vision allowed the telescope to finally spot the faint glow of six Y dwarfs relatively close to our sun, within a distance of about 40 light-years. 'WISE scanned the entire sky for these and other objects, and was able to spot their feeble light with its highly sensitive infrared vision,' said Jon Morse, Astrophysics Division director at NASA Headquarters in Washington. 'They are 5,000 times brighter at the longer infrared wavelengths WISE observed from space than those observable from the ground.'"
40 lightyears! I hereby dub these "ninja stars", for their ability to sneak up on us like this.
http://alternatives.rzero.com/
Closest or Coldest?
Things like this make me wish Dr Bob were our only resident troll.
They are (relatively) cold. They are also (relatively) close.
http://alternatives.rzero.com/
I'm not sure that NASA is taking the most efficient path here: If you want to discover cold, distant objects, any marriage counselor who is a bit flexible about confidentiality should be able to provide you with dozens of them, without any of the trouble of sophisticated infrared astronomy...
Bring back PizzaAnalogyGuy! He had real promise as an up-and-coming troll, but sadly fizzled out too quickly.
does this explain the missing mass in the universe or did we allready account for what we found? Hundreds of 'em within a 40ly radius?!
pfft
Some star.
It's the packaging material of the computers to do the mass calculation.
I was promised a flying car. Where is my flying car?
Closer than you're comfortable with, and colder than you can possibly imagine.
too bad its not liquid. set up the universe's largest swimming pool.
It means that Sheldon Cooper will need to change the song he sings when he goes down the stairs and you *know* just how much he hates change!
My sci-fi novel, Ghost Thief, is now available from Amazon.com.
From TFA, The Y dwarf approximately nine light-years away, WISE 1541-2250, may become the seventh closest star system, bumping Ross 154 back to eighth
Alpha Centauri is a single star system and this Y dwarf survey was out to 40 light-years. Ross 154 is 9.6 light-years and they think WISE 1541-2250 is just over 9.
Trying to become famous by taking photos. Visit my homepage please.
Isn't it cool that we're working on launching an infrared telescope into space, which might discover that there are lots of such things all over the place? Oh wait, congress is suddenly saying that we can't afford it, even though it costs less than the air conditioning budget for 60 days of the Iraq occupation. (link)
Do you want to be the one to tell a bunch of soldiers that they have to go without air-conditioning for two months?
http://alternatives.rzero.com/
Yeah but it already costs eight times more than Spitzer... and it's not even ready for launch yet!
As much as I'd like to see James Webb completed the fact is that there is some dreadful mismanagement on the project. As long as people like you keep trying to draw attention away from the *FACT* that NASA has lost its way we will never see publicly funded, cost-effective, progressive science again.
never let them see you sweat.
So, this star is cold enough to be the same temperature as the human body? I assume this is at the surface. How the hell does it sustain fusion/fission? It seems to me like its a borderline gas giant or something.
That brings me to an interesting point, / . is just "the ramblings of socially-inept, technology-literate news-mongers".
At what point do we start to see a picture of the small/cold tail of size distributions? One of the questions that interests me greatly is the frequency of rogue planets in the interstellar medium. If you could see a curve of brown dwarf sizes (weighted by the difficulty of detecting them), it would be fun to just naively extend the graph and see how common gas-giant sized objects would be relative to detectable stars.
He posits a large number of these dwarf gas giants, and a spacefaring civilization that lives around them: http://www.kschroeder.com/my-books/permanence
PHEM - party like it's 1997-2003!
You are quoting a retired general, who is now making a living by selling "energy efficient" equipment to Pentagon... Are you really that gullible?..
Room temperature? So could there be life on such Y Dwarves?
Sure - "Hey guys - you won't get AC anymore... because you won't need it - you are all going home!".
WISE scanned the entire sky for these and other objects
I don't think people realize how ludicrous this claim is. To scan the entire sky would require either a wide-angled telescope roughly the size of Mt. Everest and decades, or more likely an average-sized telescope and hundreds of years.
The sky is big. Really fucking big. Your little telescope can scan at most like 0.000000025% of it at once.
If the only way you can accept an assertion is by faith, then you are conceding that it can't be taken on its own merits
I always figured from their commercials that they were probably a scam.
Seeing them here spamming the shit out of their shitty product it is obvious that it is indeed a scam.
Thanks for confirming your product is a piece of shit.
Don't know something? Look it up. Still don't know? Then ask.
Finding one of these in our galactic neighborhood is quite exciting, and suggests there may be many of these even closer than Proxima Centari.
Shouldn't we put more effort into determining if there are any close enough to effectively send a probe to within our lifetimes? While it's unlikely a planetary system surrounding such a star could support life, it would still be groundbreaking to reach a neighboring star system.
Also, for 2012 nuts, this could mean there is such a heavenly body headed our way that we haven't yet detected! Let's fund the search for more of these!
How about we tell them the bad news is, no more AC in their tents... the good news is they are going home.
At the start of the search for dark matter there were two major categories of potential mater; WIMPs and MACHOs. The later are large astronomical bodies made of standard matter that are just hard to see, like brown dwarfs, blackholes, and these.
While hard to see directly, we should be able to observe indirect evidence of their existence due to gravitational lensing of objects behind them, and so forth. Since then many surveys of the sky have been performed, using these techniques. If these objects existed in the quantity needed to make up all the missing mass then we would have detected a far greater number of them than we did (at least 2 orders of magnitude more).
So while they surely exist, they can't account for more than a small fraction of the missing mass problem, unless the universe has conspired to place them none of them between us and all the luminous mass in the universe.
Now you're making me wonder, whatever happened to the guy with the thai ladyboys?
I am trolling
Nice to know there are still people gullible enough to believe everything they read on the internet. Energy costs != A/C costs.
If you can put railguns that far away, you would be better off just sending the probe instead.
"When viewed with a visible-light telescope, they are nearly impossible to see."
Shouldn't that be just "impossible to see."? How could an 80-degree (F) object be seen *at all* through a visible-light telescope, with no nearby visible light source to reflect off of?
It's the Death Star
It's not about being gullible. It's about throwing out a number that supports a point of view even if the poster knows that the number is wrong. You see tons of it around here, people using numbers and misinformation that is easily disproven but as long as it makes their "side" look good? Not many around here are grounded in the facts.
Aside from that we could go down a long list of cause and effect but that's not going to get the JWST into space any sooner. Instead of attacking the cause of James Webb's problems the OP just wanted to throw a red herring in there. It doesn't really relate and it doesn't really support their cause but I guess they feel good thinking they're witty for saying it anyway.
How does this help the Muslim people feel good about their contributions to science?
What happened to The Turd Report?
How do they know they aren't gigantic Dyson spheres?
Yeah right, "air conditioning".
Niburu found!!! Millions of tin foil hats are temporarily tossed in the air. NSA brain scanning systems overload.
Do you want to be the one to tell a bunch of soldiers that they have to go without air-conditioning for two months?
No, I want to be the one to tell soldiers they can go home.
Saving a whole bunch of money the US doesn't have in the process is just a plus.
Calling someone a "hater" only means you can not rationally rebut their argument.
Considering we overcome travel,food, & gravity on the star-ground, can we make it our "home & live".
They found 6 of these things very nearby. How big are they? If there are enough of them they could make up for the missing matter that led to the theory of Dark Matter. Or at least reduce it by a large margin.
-- ssoorrrryy,, dduupplleexx sswwiittcchh oonn.. -Quote found on actual fortune cookie.
"...like the way our skin is repaired"? And I don't suppose constant bombardment from interstellar particles at relative velocity close to c could possibly induce malfunctions "like" our melanoma?