RE: Discovery of New Nearby Star

From: Lee Corbin (lcorbin@tsoft.com)
Date: Wed Feb 12 2003 - 21:00:29 MST

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    Amara writes that a new nearby star has been discovered.
    This is great news! Here are the current nearest, with
    insertion of the new star:

    Proxima Centauri 4.2
    Alpha Cen A 4.3
    Alpha Cen B 4.3
    HPMS ?
    Barnard's Star 6.0
    Wolf 359 CN Leo 7.7
    BD +36 2147 8.2
    Luyten 726-8A UV Cet A 8.4
    Luyten 726-8B UV Cet B 8.4
    Sirius A Alpha CMa A 8.6
    Sirius B Alpha CMa B 8.6

    My data was taken from
    http://www.astro.wisc.edu/~dolan/constellations/extra/nearest.html

    Lee

    > 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.
    >
    > --
    >
    > ***********************************************************************
    > Amara Graps, PhD email: amara@amara.com
    > Computational Physics vita: ftp://ftp.amara.com/pub/resume.txt
    > Multiplex Answers URL: http://www.amara.com/
    > ***********************************************************************
    > "Living on earth may be expensive, but it includes an annual free trip
    > around the sun." --Ashleigh Brilliant
    >

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