THERE’S a new star in town – a dim red dwarf. The star, with the unwieldy name SO025300.5+165258, is the third nearest star system to our Sun. Although it had been catalogued before, no one realised that it was so close, says Bonnard Teegarden from the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland.
Teegarden and his team spotted the dwarf in pictures taken by NASA to track near-Earth asteroids, and noticed that it appeared to be moving fast against the background, suggesting it was nearby. In a paper submitted to the Astrophysical Journal Letters, they estimate that the red dwarf…
