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Astronomers recently discovered two brown dwarfs in our solar neighborhood, and they’re actually pretty close by: 15 and 18 light years away!
[IMG]http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/badastronomy/files/2011/07/WISE_nearby_bds.jpg[/IMG]
[Click to hugely unendwarfenate.]
The two objects were spotted in observations made by WISE, the Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer, which recently finished its mission to observe the entire sky in infrared light. In the false color images from WISE, brown dwarfs tend to appear very green (fun details are in that link), making them somewhat easy to spot against full-blown stars which tend to appear blue — remember, this is false color!
Anyway, the astronomers were looking for nearby brown dwarfs (PDF), so they searched for green objects that had no obvious counterparts in older infrared surveys. All stars orbit the center of the Milky Way galaxy at different velocities, and over time that means they move across the sky. Nearby stars appear to move fastest (just like the nearby trees fly past you while driving, but distant mountains appear to move more slowly), so nearby brown dwarfs would have moved in the time separating the older surveys from that of WISE.
The astronomers actually found quite a few objects, most of which were known. But these two, called WISE J0254+0223 and WISE J1741+2553, were not previously known — in the picture above, their positions in the older survey from 2000 are labeled compared to their positions in the 2010 WISE images. Remarkably, only 39 star systems (I include multiple stars as one system here) are known to be closer to us than J1741 (which is 15 light years away), and only a handful of them are brown dwarfs (what are called T class objects).
Which, as always when we find new nearby stars, make me wonder: are there faint, cool brown dwarfs even closer to us? Is it possible that Proxima Centauri, a red dwarf 4.2 light years away, is not the closest star to the Sun?
Maybe. The WISE data used to find these two neighbors is not the full set taken by the spacecraft. There’s still quite a bit of data to sift through. Who knows, we may yet find out there’s a star or stars passing by still waiting to make our acquaintance.
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Source: [url]http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/badastronomy/2011/08/09/two-new-nearby-brown-dwarfs-found/[/url]
oh wow 15 ly isn't that far away compared to the billions of other stars
came into this thread expecting midgets
dont know if dissapointed
[editline]9th August 2011[/editline]
[QUOTE=Instant Mix;31629960]oh wow 15 ly isn't that far away compared to the billions of other stars[/QUOTE]
also this
The real world is one step closer to Permanence:
[QUOTE]But the brown dwarfs each had their retinue of planets— the halo worlds, as they came to be called. And though they were not lit to the human eye, many of these planets were bathed in hot infrared radiation. Many were stretched and heated by tidal effects, like Io, a moon of Jupiter and the hottest place in the Solar System. And while Jupiter's magnetic field was already strong enough to heat its moons through electrical induction, the magnetic field of a brown dwarf fifty times Jupiter's mass radiated unimaginable power— power enough to heat worlds. Power enough to sustain a population of billions; enough to launch starships.
Did Dr. Ruiz ever step outside and gaze up at the stars and think that for every star she saw, there were five she could not see? Did she realize that the moment she discovered Kelu-1, she had taken star travel from dream to possibility? For although the stars were as far away as ever, with her discovery the known distance between planetary systems had been halved.[/QUOTE]
Brown dwarfs with planets sound kinda interesting, as is the prospect of there being nearby "stars" that we cannot see.
I don't want to be racist or anything but when I saw the title I thought brown dwarfs
I mean black midgets. It's a misleading title.
[QUOTE=Mr.T;31633340]I don't want to be racist or anything but when I saw the title I thought brown dwarfs
I mean black midgets. It's a misleading title.[/QUOTE]
I agree, i wanna complain.
