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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.'"
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.
> Couldn't you describe any star in such a fashion?
No.
For any range X there is a "youngest star" within that range. The reverse is not true.
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
Mods, this is not offtopic. It's a reference to the theme song of the science fiction comedy Red Dwarf. Consider your geek cards revoked.
If all else fails, immortality can always be assured by spectacular error.