Discovery of New Nearby Star

From: Amara Graps (amara@amara.com)
Date: Wed Feb 12 2003 - 02:25:09 MST

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    http://xxx.lanl.gov/abs/astro-ph/0302206

    Astrophysics, abstract
    astro-ph/0302206

    From: Bonnard Teegarden <bonnard@milkyway.gsfc.nasa.gov>
    Date: Tue, 11 Feb 2003 18:26:01 GMT (139kb)

    Discovery of a New Nearby Star

    Authors: B. J. Teegarden, S. H. Pravdo, M. Hicks, S. B. Shaklan, K. Covey,
    O. Fraser, S. L. Hawley, T. McGlynn, I. N. Reid
    Comments: 5 pages, 3 figures. Submitted to ApJ Letters

          We report the discovery of a nearby star with a very large proper
          motion of 5.06 +/- 0.03 arcsec/yr. The star is called
          SO025300.5+165258 and referred to herein as HPMS (high proper
          motion star). The discovery came as a result of a search of the
          SkyMorph database, a sensitive and persistent survey that is well
          suited for finding stars with high proper motions. There are
          currently only 7 known stars with proper motions > 5 arcsec/yr. We
          have determined a preliminary value for the parallax of 0.43 +/-
          0.13 arcsec. If this value holds our new star ranks behind only
          the Alpha Centauri system (including Proxima Centauri) and
          Barnard's star in the list of our nearest stellar neighbors. The
          spectrum and measured tangential velocity indicate that HPMS is a
          main-sequence star with spectral type M6.5. However, if our
          distance measurement is correct, the HPMS is underluminous by 1.2
          +/- 0.7 mag.

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    Amara Graps, PhD             email: amara@amara.com
    Computational Physics        vita:  ftp://ftp.amara.com/pub/resume.txt
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