Volunteers Spot Almost 100 Cold Brown Dwarfs Near Our Sun (space.com) 36
Citizen scientists have spotted almost 100 of our sun's nearest neighbors. Space.com reports: In a new study, members of the public -- including both professional scientists and volunteers -- discovered 95 brown dwarfs (celestial objects too big to be considered planets and too small to be considered stars) near our sun through the NASA-funded citizen science project Backyard Worlds: Planet 9. They made this discovery with the help of astronomers using the National Science Foundations National Optical-Infrared Astronomy Research Laboratory. Brown dwarfs are unusual celestial objects -- much heavier than planets but not massive enough to become stars. The celestial objects can be seriously hot (think thousands of degrees Fahrenheit), but these 95 newly-discovered neighbors are surprisingly cool. Some of these weird worlds are even relatively close to Earth's temperature and could be cool enough to have water clouds in their atmospheres, according to the statement.
Not that close (Score:5, Informative)
[1] The closest of these new discoveries is roughly 23 light-years away from the Sun. Many more of these brown dwarfs are in the 30–60 light-year distance range.
Re:Not that close (Score:4, Funny)
By cosmic standards, that's basically right on top of us.
Also, has anyone already checked the hyperway express route planning details that are on Alpha Centauri?
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Its not as interesting though because there are bound to be plenty of exoplanets orbiting stars within 23 light years. A brown dwarf inside a tenth of a light year though...
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A massive object passing that close undetected isn't impossible, but it is unlikely because it would probably disturb the Oort cloud enough to send more comets than usual inwards.
Apparently from study of impact craters we know that a star passes close enough to send a rain of comets in quite frequently by astronomical timescales. The last one, a small red dwarf, was only 50k years ago, so it will be 2M years or so until that wave of comets reaches the inner system. It was probably visible to early man dur
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Star systems and brown dwarfs out to 16 light years (5 parsecs, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]): 53, if I counted correctly. (I counted systems, i.e. Alpha Centauri A, Alpha Centauri B and Proxima Centauri count as one.) Another 62 from 16 to 20 light years out (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_star_systems_within_16%E2%80%9320_light-years). Another 35 or so out to 23 light years (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_star_systems_within_20%E2%80%9325_light-years). I believe most of the nearest
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I started looking into it, but I'm afraid of leopards.
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And I forgot my flashlight and ladder.
astronomy near is not general near (Score:3)
The secondary articles really missed the distinction between astronomical scale and peoples general conceptions. The quote here is a footnote in a secondary article from the link.
Near to the sun, would generally mean at least nearer to the sun than I am right now, not way way further from the sun than I am right now. The article authors should have described the distance with a better term than "near".
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No your near is too near, I would have considered anything within Oort cloud distance, things bound to the sun (out to as much as about 1.5 light year in theory), as "near".
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Near to the sun, would generally mean at least nearer to the sun than I am right now, not way way further from the sun than I am right now.
This just shows your reading comprehension isn't very good, and you make an excess of needless assumptions to try to smooth things over.
When you turn on a radio, and they talk about something being near to a city, is the context you? Or does the context include the something, and the city, but not your location at all?
When a sportsball announcer says, "That play nearly succeeded!" do you think they're comparing how good the play was to if you had done it, or is it near to something else?
Near to the Sun in i
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When you turn on a radio, and they talk about something being near to a city, is the context you? Or does the context include the something, and the city, but not your location at all?
That depends on whether the listener is near that city. If so, and if the event is ridiculously far from the listener, one would expect laughter at the claim that it was near the city.
I'm in Sunnyvale. That's near San Jose. If the news talked about something in Antarctica and said that it was near San Jose, I'd be baffled, because from any sane frame of reference, that is not true, and from a frame of reference far enough away for it to be true, describing it in terms of San Jose makes no sense, because
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Re: Not that close (Score:2)
Dark matter isnâ(TM)t just dust and planets and other matter we donâ(TM)t see because it isnâ(TM)t being illuminated. It is a fundamentally different type of matter that doesnâ(TM)t interact with the electromagnetic force (like neutrinos) and therefore cannot be seen.
Also... (Score:2, Funny)
The largest of them, named Dopey, claimed to have spotted more than any of the other scientists.
Re:America and dumbass imperial units (Score:5, Insightful)
thousands of degrees Fahrenheit
Yes, that's a weird way or presenting it.
Thousands of degrees Fahrenheit should also be thousands of degrees Celsius, Kelvin and Rankine, they are all in the same order of magnitude.
It is an order of magnitude that goes up to sun-like stars (the surface temperature of the sun is 5800K or about 10000F).
Furthermore, even within Imperial countries, "thousands" is not something we deal with in our everyday life, unless, maybe, if you are into metallurgy. What matters with stars is usually their glow, which approximates a blackbody, and it is usually expressed in Kelvin. And that's an area the public is now familiar with, thanks to energy efficient lightbulbs which specify a color temperature in Kelvin. So people should understand that a star that is 2700K glows like a "warm white" light bulb.
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I doubt it (Score:1, Redundant)
They are not brown dwarfs, they are height-challenged, over-tanned suns.
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"I though tanning was when you got too much sun???"
If a fucking star doesn't get enough sun, who does?
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At least one of them might be CowboyNeal on vacation.
Dark matter? (Score:4, Insightful)
I've been pointing out, for decades now, that "dark matter" in cosmology does not mean "non-baryonic". The complex models of unobserved and undetected matter of the various 11-dimensional, curled up, string, and other exotic matter theories without experimental prediction or validation were conjured to explain matter, "dark matter", that is deduced on galactic and and universal scales but which does not show up in our detected astronomy. The startling number of cool or cold dense objects in even solar proximity could well explain this if these are common place. They are cool or cold, dense, and thus would not violate Olber's Paradox.
Re:Dark matter? (Score:4, Interesting)
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> So are brown dwarfs ubiquitous, occurring in sufficient numbers to account for an appreciable amount of the ‘dark matter’ in the galaxy?
It's a good question, along with extrasolar planetary bodies.
> observed the stars for several years and looked for the kind of lensing events that would indicate the presence of a dark object between the star and the observer.
Expecting planetyry or 'brown dwarf' scale objects to to affect such observations is, I think, optimistic at best. Note that the
What a relief (Score:2, Funny)
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