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Gemini Detects Something "Cool" in Our Neighborhood: Closest Known Brown Dwarf has a Companion
27 Octubre 2004: Closest Known Brown Dwarf has a Companion. While searching for planet-sized bodies that might accompany the nearby star system Epsilon Indi, astronomers using the Gemini South telescope in Chile made a related but unexpected detection. Widely observed by telescopes on the ground and in space, Epsilon Indi was known to host an orbiting companion, called Epsilon Indi B, which was discovered last year and is the nearest known specimen of a brown dwarf. Brown dwarfs are very small, cool stars thirty to forty times more massive than Jupiter but of similar size. Despite all the observing, it took the combination of Gemini's powerful infrared capabilities and the extremely sensitive spectrograph/imager called PHOENIX (without adaptive optics) to reveal the more elusive body. "Epsilon Indi Ba is the closest confirmed brown dwarf to our solar system," says Dr. Gordon Walker (University of British Columbia, Vancouver, Canada), who led the research team that …