<p>In a first-of-its-kind discovery in nearly a century, NASA scientists have found the third-closest star system to the Sun - located only 6.5 light-years away. The pair of newly found stars is the closest star system discovered since 1916.<br /><br /></p>.<p>Both stars in the new binary system discovered by NASA's Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE) are "brown dwarfs", which are stars that are too small in mass to ever become hot enough to ignite hydrogen fusion.<br /><br />As a result, they are very cool and dim, resembling a giant planet like Jupiter more than a bright star like the Sun.<br /><br />"The distance to this brown dwarf pair is 6.5 light-years - so close that Earth's television transmissions from 2006 are now arriving there," said Kevin Luhman, an associate professor of astronomy and astrophysics at Penn State University, University Park, and a researcher in Penn State's Center for Exoplanets and Habitable Worlds.<br /><br />"It will be an excellent hunting ground for planets because the system is very close to Earth, which makes it a lot easier to see any planets orbiting either of the brown dwarfs," Luhman said in a statement.<br /><br />The star system is named "WISE J104915.57-531906" because it was discovered in an infrared map of the entire sky obtained by WISE.<br /><br />It is only slightly farther away than the second-closest star, Barnard's star, which was discovered 6 light-years from the Sun in 1916.<br /><br />The closest star system consists of: Alpha Centauri, found to be a neighbour of the Sun in 1839 at 4.4 light-years away, and the fainter Proxima Centauri, discovered in 1917 at 4.2 light-years.<br /><br />"One major goal when proposing WISE was to find the closest stars to the Sun. WISE J1049-5319 is by far the closest star found to date using the WISE data, and the close-up views of this binary system we can get with big telescopes like Gemini and the future James Webb Space Telescope will tell us a lot about the low-mass stars known as brown dwarfs," Edward (Ned) Wright, the principal investigator for the WISE satellite at University of California, Los Angeles, said.<br /><br />The study will be published in Astrophysical Journal Letters.</p>
<p>In a first-of-its-kind discovery in nearly a century, NASA scientists have found the third-closest star system to the Sun - located only 6.5 light-years away. The pair of newly found stars is the closest star system discovered since 1916.<br /><br /></p>.<p>Both stars in the new binary system discovered by NASA's Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE) are "brown dwarfs", which are stars that are too small in mass to ever become hot enough to ignite hydrogen fusion.<br /><br />As a result, they are very cool and dim, resembling a giant planet like Jupiter more than a bright star like the Sun.<br /><br />"The distance to this brown dwarf pair is 6.5 light-years - so close that Earth's television transmissions from 2006 are now arriving there," said Kevin Luhman, an associate professor of astronomy and astrophysics at Penn State University, University Park, and a researcher in Penn State's Center for Exoplanets and Habitable Worlds.<br /><br />"It will be an excellent hunting ground for planets because the system is very close to Earth, which makes it a lot easier to see any planets orbiting either of the brown dwarfs," Luhman said in a statement.<br /><br />The star system is named "WISE J104915.57-531906" because it was discovered in an infrared map of the entire sky obtained by WISE.<br /><br />It is only slightly farther away than the second-closest star, Barnard's star, which was discovered 6 light-years from the Sun in 1916.<br /><br />The closest star system consists of: Alpha Centauri, found to be a neighbour of the Sun in 1839 at 4.4 light-years away, and the fainter Proxima Centauri, discovered in 1917 at 4.2 light-years.<br /><br />"One major goal when proposing WISE was to find the closest stars to the Sun. WISE J1049-5319 is by far the closest star found to date using the WISE data, and the close-up views of this binary system we can get with big telescopes like Gemini and the future James Webb Space Telescope will tell us a lot about the low-mass stars known as brown dwarfs," Edward (Ned) Wright, the principal investigator for the WISE satellite at University of California, Los Angeles, said.<br /><br />The study will be published in Astrophysical Journal Letters.</p>