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RE: Binary brown dwarf discovered 6.5 ly from Earth, closest in a century.
March 17, 2013 at 10:31 am
That certainly is a possibility, though with the terra-terra bytes of data from all the sky surveys that have been done to date, I would think we'd have had a hint of that by now. I don't think it has been ruled out, though.
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RE: Binary brown dwarf discovered 6.5 ly from Earth, closest in a century.
March 17, 2013 at 11:33 am
I believe the theoretical detection distance of coolest and smallest brown dwarves is well under 1 light year using current technology. Even if we have surveyed every part of the sky with our best technology, we would still have only excluded any closer brown dwarves than alpha centuri from less than 1/64th of the volume of space such brown dwarves might occupy.
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RE: Binary brown dwarf discovered 6.5 ly from Earth, closest in a century.
March 17, 2013 at 2:03 pm
(March 17, 2013 at 11:33 am)Chuck Wrote: I believe the theoretical detection distance of coolest and smallest brown dwarves is well under 1 light year using current technology. Even if we have surveyed every part of the sky with our best technology, we would still have only excluded any closer brown dwarves than alpha centuri from less than 1/64th of the volume of space such brown dwarves might occupy.
But that would apply only to the coolest and smallest brown dwarves, right? A larger, warmer one should theoretically be detectable further out.
'The difference between a Miracle and a Fact is exactly the difference between a mermaid and seal. It could not be expressed better.'
-- Samuel "Mark Twain" Clemens
"I think that in the discussion of natural problems we ought to begin not with the scriptures, but with experiments, demonstrations, and observations".
- Galileo Galilei (1564-1642)
"In short, Meyer has shown that his first disastrous book was not a fluke: he is capable of going into any field in which he has no training or research experience and botching it just as badly as he did molecular biology. As I've written before, if you are a complete amateur and don't understand a subject, don't demonstrate the Dunning-Kruger effect by writing a book about it and proving your ignorance to everyone else! "
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RE: Binary brown dwarf discovered 6.5 ly from Earth, closest in a century.
March 31, 2013 at 4:18 pm
(This post was last modified: March 31, 2013 at 4:32 pm by Anomalocaris.)
Yes.
But there are probably many more cool, dim, nearly jovian planet sized mini-brown dwarves than there are large hot, nearly stellar sized maxi-brown dwarves. So statistically, if there is a brown dwarves nearer than alpha centuri, it is more likely it would turn out to be dim and cool, and so hard to detect, instead and bright and warm.
