AN EXTREMELY faint star has turned up in our backyard, as close as 13 light
years away.
The object is between 60 and 90 times the mass of Jupiter, so it could be
either a brown dwarf—a failed star—or a more distant red giant. It’s
almost certainly not the only one. “The presence of this low-mass object so
close to us indicates that even closer ones remain to discovered,” says Eduardo
Martin of the University of Hawaii, a member of the team that made the
discovery.
