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)."

Re:Can someone explain something to me?

[osu-neko]

The premise behind your question is the fallacy of the convertibility of human time and resources, as if we're all interchangeable and equally qualified to participate in any task. Let me put it this way: how much further would we get into understanding the Standard Model if the millions of people playing World of Warcraft would work on that instead?

Once you already have the world's theoretical physicists working on theoretical physics problems like like, what makes you think people in other fields would make a useful contribution?

Astronomers look for objects in the sky because they're astronomers. They aren't going to crack problems of theoretical high-energy physics, and they're not in the mood to play WoW 24/7...

Andromeda "collision" is more scary

[peter303]

Andromeda is trillions of times more massive and will "collide" with the Milky Way in two billion years. But they will interpetrate each other like ghosts passing in the night. Odds are unlikely there wont be a single stellar collision among the trillion stars during the Big Merge. The night sky will become rather interesting with multiple stellar bands lighting the sky.