6 Facts You Never Imagined About The Nearest Stars To Earth
The solar neighborhood is so different than people imagine. But for the first time, we know what it’s like.
When you look up at the stars in the night sky, they appear with different brightnesses, colors, and clustering patterns. But when you see a star, you don’t immediately know whether it’s an isolated star or part of a multiple-star system, whether it’s intrinsically bright or intrinsically faint, and whether it’s nearby or far away. All you know, from a first inspection, is how bright and what color it appears to be. It turns out that most of the stars visible to the naked eye are actually intrinsically very bright, unusually blue, and quite far away. What about the closest stars? While a few of them are bright, nearby, and famous — like Alpha Centauri and Sirius — most of them require special equipment and techniques to find. In 1994, a team of astronomers formed RECONS, the REsearch Consortium On Nearby Stars, to investigate and learn about the nearest stars to Earth. They’ve just released their latest results; here are the highlights.
