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.'"

Re:Cleaner

[Desler]

Bring back PizzaAnalogyGuy [slashdot.org]! He had real promise as an up-and-coming troll, but sadly fizzled out too quickly.

Re:Fail?

[jameskojiro]

Based on how many cold dwarf stars we have found so far, there may be stars like this one within 2 LY or less. In which case they would make for a great candidate for a high speed interstellar probe.

I wonder how many the Webb telescope would find!

[Dr. Spork]

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 [npr.org])

Re:Fail?

[geekoid]

Then that would be the most awesome finding ever.

Re:Fail?

[The Dawn Of Time]

I'll share with you a technique that has helped me immeasurably throughout my life: when I find a glaring mistake in someone's output, something that they just should not have overlooked, I first assume that I've misunderstood something and the mistake is actually mine and check again. 90% of the time, it saves me from looking like a jackass.

Re:Wow

[MightyMartian]

I think it's a fuzzy definition, and I don't think there's ever been any consensus on calling them stars. Pretty much every article I've read on them refers to them as brown dwarfs (or M, L, Y or T dwarfs), so I'd fault the editor of that one for sloppy use of the word. I don't think you can call any object that doesn't have sustained fission reactions a star, and certainly not one radiating at around the same temperature as a human body.

Re:Fail?

[CrimsonAvenger]

IDK, if you had a vasmir pushing at .1G for a year, you would be going about ~.1c, in that case you could be there in 20 years. I think this would be semi-reasonable.

Hmm, let's do a quick check of the numbers.

According to Wikipedia, we can reasonably expect 5000 seconds Isp from a VASIMR, but let's assume ten times that, just for grins.

So, one year (365.24 days) at 0.98 m/s^2 acceleration implies deltaV of 30925 km/s.

30925 km/s @ 50000 seconds Isp translates to a mass ratio of 2566254356903250866674835623:1.

So, a 10 kg probe (including drive and fuel tankage) would require 25662543569032508666748356229 kg of reaction mass. Which is about the mass of the Sun...

So, no, this would NOT be even semi-reasonable....