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Baby Red Dwarf Found Just 27 Light Years Away
bazzalunatic writes "Astronomers have found an infant red dwarf star 27 light years away from Earth, and it's just 40 million years old. 'The star has been known about and studied for the past 15 years, but it wasn't realized it was so young and so close, until now,' co-author Simon Murphy, a PhD student from the Australian National University said in the story. More accurate measurements from telescopes have aided the revised distances of the star dubbed 'AP Colombae.'"
fun, fun, fun....
Cause Judas Rimmer would be a silly name.
"Have you ever thought about just turning off the TV, sitting down with your kids, and hitting them?"
Does it have inside of it a baby Cat, baby Lister, baby Kryten, and baby holographic Rimmer?
Blog,Twitter
i want my baby dwarf baby dwarf baby dwarf
i want my baby dwarf baby dwarf baby dwarf
i want my baby dwarf baby dwarf baby dwarf
baaaaaybe red dwarf
barbecue sauce
Does anyone know how far away they previously thought this start was? And when do I get my cryo-chamber?
Ok so this is the youngest of stars within x range of us.
Couldn't you describe any star in such a fashion?
I think this is pretty cool to think that this star is younger than the dinosaurs, but I would have thought that would still be cool no matter the distance it was from us?
Don't know something? Look it up. Still don't know? Then ask.
Horrible concept for a TV show. Horrible.
It seems that over the last few years we've had more and more objects which have turned out to be really surprisingly close. Earlier this month, WISE discovered a set of brown dwarfs which are even closer to us http://science.slashdot.org/story/11/08/24/1520206/NASA-Discovers-7th-Closest-Star. WISE has turned out to be a very good investment. Although it was primarily made for the discovery and tracking of near-Earth asteroids, it has turned out to be very useful for near stellar astronomy. This is a different situation than the brown dwarfs because this was an object which we knew about but didn't realize was so nearby. AP Columbae is both very close, and very young. It is only 40 million years old, which makes it very young. TFA discusses how they used the lithium levels in the star to estimate its age. This is a standard technique that is also used to distinguish between cool stars and brown dwarfs since brown dwarfs don't touch their lithium enough to substantially reduce the quantities (although in this case we already knew that this was a star and not a brown dwarf). One thing to note is that this star is extremely faint. Even though it is so close it has an apparent magnitude of around +13 which means that you can't see it unless you have a very big telescope (With apparent magnitude large numbers are fainter. So for example, Venus has an apparent magnitude of around -5 and Sirius has an apparent magnitude of about -1.4. +13 is really dim.) So we have a very dim, small star right nearby.
Good grief, do you find nothing interesting just for the sake of it?
Well, as long as we're being pedantic...let's say we never figure out how to break or dodge the light speed limit, but we do learn how to travel at 0.9c. Now this one is 30 years away (or 60 or so if you want to count acceleration at launch and landing, which I'm sure you do). And your average Milky Way star that's say 50,000 lightyears away is now...gosh, it's actually a whole hell of a lot more unreachable.
Yo dawg, I heard you like the Ackermann function, so OH GOD OH GOD OH GOD
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6kJXxGMeMbs
I bet you're a hoot at parties.
Also, 27 light years is a very small distance, when you consider the universe we can observe is around 45.7 to 46.6 billion light years across depending on how you mesure it(according to wikipedia anyway).. "Just" is justified in such a discription of distance i'd hope.
Nobody is claiming we're going to be visiting it anytime soon.
We should pop over for the weekend...
I believe extending our lifespan is a far more realistic goal then trying to deal with the speed and distance issue of space. When people can reach 500+ in age the distances to other objects in space will be a lesser concern.
No need to violate the laws of physics, if we knew how to build a ship that constantly accelerated at 1G then it'd only take 6.58 years to get there. OTOH, of course it's impossible with today's technology, just as reaching the moon was 42 years ago, or powered flight 67 years before that. Much like with anything else, "I don't know how to do it" is not equivalent to "it cannot be done", so even faster-than-light travel may well be possible when we have a better understanding of physics.
Pardon, talk PC, it's an ALP (Amerindian Little Person)
If you calculate that it's going to take 6.58 years to reach something that is 27 light years away, your instinct should be to question the validity of your method. In this particular case, you should have noticed that Newtonian mechanics are no longer a good fit for reality when velocities close to the speed of light are involved.
Reaching the moon is impossible with the technology of today. It'd take several years and gobs of work to recreate what we knew in 1969.
The creatures outside looked from Alt-Right to Antifa; but already it was impossible to say which was which.
you are kinda still lacking in the laws of physics then. No matter how your acceleration is, you cannot accelerate faster then the speed of light following current laws of physics. Meaning if a ship could consistantly accelerate, it would cap out at the speed of light and cease to be able to accelerate. That is on par in accuracy with saying, if you just drive your car at 60MPH, you will reach australia in just a few months. That being said the accurate question shouldn't be can we get there, Obviously reaching a star is rather pointless, the sun has been significantly closer for years, I don't see us landing on it any time soon, due to the whole, it is a giant ball of burning gasses that would completely destroy any thing or any one that got near it. The question is, is ther anything that could be gathered by observing it, that can't be gathered from observing our own sun or the farther stars. That question still remains to be answered.
Sorry, but small correction to make:
Your hypothetical ship wouldn't top out at light speed; it would top out before light speed. You can accelerate arbitrarily close to c but you will never, ever achieve it. This might seem a petty distinction, but it's a fundamental law of nature (at least as far as we currently understand them).
If you calculate that it's going to take 6.58 years to reach something that is 27 light years away, your instinct should be to question the validity of your method. In this particular case, you should have noticed that Newtonian mechanics are no longer a good fit for reality when velocities close to the speed of light are involved.
What's the problem, exactly? The OP could have been talking about ship time. Perhaps next time you could say why a person is wrong instead of assuming we're all as smart as you apparently are.
My interest in astronomy came from shows like Star Trek and heck, even Red Dwarf.
As for staying on topic, if it is a purpose so worth our service, why don't you practice what you preach next time and either say something on topic, or keep quiet.
You're just not worthy of Slashdot.
Is anyone else reminded of Asimov's novel, Nemesis? Here's to the discovered closeness of this red dwarf upsetting the gravitational stability of our solar system!
Well, constant acceleration means that you're nearing light speed fairly quickly, and relativistic effects (time dilation and length contraction) kick in. It's been four years since I studied physics, and haven't used it since, so I'll defer to a better explanation than I could give at the moment.
As for why to travel to stars, it's more a matter of what we might find in the future. Right now, if we were on Alpha Centauri, we would probably know about Jupiter or Saturn, but we'd have no idea the Earth existed, it's too small to wobble the star significantly. There could be tons of Earth-like planets orbiting the hundreds of "nearby" stars. With the human species' instinct to explore and multiply, I have little doubt that we'll reach out to the solar system, and eventually other stars before we meet some Malthusian prediction.
We're going to hit lightspeed in 24 hours. I have to navigate a ship the size of a city through speeds never before encountered in the human sphere of experience--I'm not a combination of the speaking clock, Moss Bros, and Teasy-Weasy.
Or maybe if you weren't a moron you would realize he must be talking about the amount of time that would pass for the passengers on the ship and not that amount of time that would pass for a stationary observer. And if you do the math, 6.58 years is the correct answer.
So they've been probing an underage star for 15 years? Didn't know how old she was? That's what they all say...
There is no page for AP Columbae .. how can that be?
NB. The WP search says, "Did you mean 'APA Columbae?'", but if you go for that option, it still finds no results. That bug has been around for a while in Google.
Watch Out!
Wow, I almost got poked in the eye....
Red Dwarf? I think Red Little Star is more appropriate.
Where does the signature go?