Astronomers Discover Third-Closest Star System To Earth

The Bad Astronomer writes "Astronomers have found the third-closest star system to the Earth: called WISE 1049-5319, it's a binary brown dwarf system just 6.5 light years away. Brown dwarfs are faint, low mass objects 13 — 75 times the mass of Jupiter, and are so dim they are very difficult to detect. These newly-found nearby objects were seen in observations from 1978 but went unnoticed at the time, but since that date the large apparent motion of the binary made their proximity obvious. Only two star systems are closer: Alpha Centauri (4.3 light years) and Barnard's star (6 light years)."

Comments

Re:And where's the mass of the universe?

[Baloroth]

Can someone explain to me how discovering the THIRD closes system to ours in 2013 doesn't suggest that all the Dark Matter(tm) that's out there just isn't a mass of brown dwarfs that we can't see, and not a whole new class of matter?

Because of Big Bang nucleosynthesis. We can know how much baryonic matter ("normal" matter) there is in the universe by certain cosmological observations. Other cosmological observations show there is more matter out there than that (about 5 times more) and therefore it cannot all be brown dwarfs, black holes, or other dark but non-exotic forms of matter.