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Throwback Thursday: The closest invisible lights (Synopsis) [Starts With A Bang]
“As a boy I believed I could make myself invisible. I’m not sure that I ever could, but I certainly had the ability to pass unnoticed.” -Terence Stamp
When you take a look at the stars visible in the night sky, you’re only seeing a tiny fraction of what’s actually present in our galaxy. Your intuition would tell you that you’re probably seeing the closest stars to Earth, but that’s only partially right.
Image credit: Richard Powell of http://www.atlasoftheuniverse.com/.
Of the ten closest star systems in the night sky, only two of them are visible to the naked eye, and if we start to include brown dwarfs, the situation gets even muddier. Rather than fuse hydrogen into helium, brown dwarfs can only fuse whatever trace amounts of deuterium they’re born with into heavier elements, and they’re often so cool they’re completely unseeable in the visible part of the spectrum. Recently, the WISE spacecraft detected a binary brown dwarf system just 6.5 light years from Earth — the third closest star system of all — but only the James Webb Space Telescope will determine once-and-for-all whether there’s a brown dwarf closer to us than Proxima Centauri.
Image credit: NASA / JPL / Gemini Observatory / AURA / NSF.
Go read the whole story here on the closest invisible lights.
Source: http://scienceblogs.com/startswithabang/2015/03/12/throwback-thursday-the-closest-invisible-lights-synopsis/
