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This image is an artist's conception of the binary system WISE J104915.57-531906 with the sun in the background.
Scientists have discovered the closest star system to the sun found in nearly a century. With a dim duo of "failed stars" known as brown dwarfs at its center, the new neighbor is the third-nearest to our solar system overall, and it could be a good place to look for exoplanets, researchers say. "The distance to this brown dwarf pair is 6.5 light-years — so close that Earth's television transmissions from 2006 are now arriving there," Kevin Luhman, a researcher at Penn State's Center for Exoplanets and Habitable Worlds, said in a statement. "It will be an excellent hunting ground for planets because it is very close to Earth, which makes it a lot easier to see any planets orbiting either of the brown dwarfs." [The Strangest Alien Planets] Brown dwarfs are strange objects that are bigger than planets but too small to trigger the internal nuclear fusion reactions required to become full-fledged stars.
This pair is slightly farther away than Barnard's star, a red dwarf discovered in 1916 that lies 6.0 light-years from the sun. The closest system to Earth is Alpha Centauri, whose two main stars, Alpha Centauri A and Alpha Centauri B, form a binary pair that are about 4.4 light-years from the sun. Last year an Earth-size planet was discovered in the Alpha Centauri system, suggesting it may host other alien worlds as well. Officially named WISE J104915.57-531906, the newly discovered system was spotted in a map obtained by NASA's Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE) spacecraft, which spent its 13-month mission scanning the entire sky 1 1/2 times, taking about 1.8 million images of asteroids, stars and galaxies. "One major goal when proposing WISE was to find the closest stars to the sun," said the mission's principal investigator, Ned Wright of UCLA. "WISE 1049-5319 is by far the closest star found to date using the WISE data, and the close-up views of this binary system we can get with big telescopes like Gemini and the future James Webb Space Telescope will tell us a lot about the low-mass stars known as brown dwarfs." Luhman noticed that this particular system seemed to be racing across the sky in the WISE images. "In these time-lapse images, I was able to tell that this system was moving very quickly across the sky, which was a big clue that it was probably very close to our solar system," Luhman said. Turning to older surveys of the sky, he spotted the system in images obtained between 1978 and 1999 from the Digitized Sky Survey, the Two Micron All-Sky Survey and the Deep Near Infrared Survey of the Southern Sky. "Based on how this star system was moving in the images from the WISE survey, I was able to extrapolate back in time to predict where it should have been located in the older surveys and, sure enough, it was there," Luhman explained in a statement. The star system's distance was measured by trigonometric parallax, which can only be done if an object is close enough to show an apparent shift in position relative to much farther background stars, due to the Earth's orbit around the sun. After obtaining a spectrum of the system with the Gemini South telescope on Cerro Pachón in Chile, Luhman also determined that the system has a very cool temperature and is actually made up of two objects. "It was a lot of detective work," Luhman said. "There are billions of infrared points of light across the sky, and the mystery is which one — if any of them — could be a star that is very close to our solar system." The research was published in March in Astrophysical Journal Letters.
Farmer Bruce found an odd rock that may be a meteorite 1.5 billion years old
Snake! Woman says she found one in bag of potatoes from Wal-Mart
A woman says she got an extra ingredient in a bag of potatoes purchased at Wal-Mart: a three-and-a-half-foot orange-and-white snake.
Bonnie Raygor of North Huntingdon, Pa., bought a bag of potatoes from Wal-Mart about a week ago. The bag remained closed until she got out some of the spuds to cook on Thursday. That’s when she found the snake. “First I saw its underbelly, which is white. I thought I had a bad potato. Instead I had a snake," Raygor told WTAE. "The bag was sealed. ... So I'm assuming it was in there when I bought it. I screamed." The fast-thinking snake wrangler got the critter into a reptile enclosure she still had for previous pets. Based on Web research, she thinks it’s a “corn snake.” Raygor called the store to alert it of her unwelcome find. "First, they told me I should bring it to the lawn and garden department and they'd take care of it," Raygor said. "And then I was dissatisfied, so I called and asked to speak to a manager, and he said if I had a receipt, I could get a refund.” WTAE also reached out to Wal-Mart, which said its food safety team would be in contact with the customer. The store also plans to be in touch with the potato distributor to find out where the snake came from.
Mother and daughter reunited after 40 years
Naomi Martinez has been reunited with her mother after 40 years When Naomi Martinez was just 5, her father whisked her away from their home in Costa Rica and told her mother never wanted to see her again. But 40 years later, KRQE News 13 reports,Martinez has been reunited with her motherthanks to Facebook and a surprising revelation about her past.
Martinez had severely burned her arm as a child when her father, Curtis Dilas, took her to the United States under the guise of getting medical treatment for the injury. However, Martinez was never taken to a hospital for her burn and was instead told her mother had abandoned her. “I thought she abandoned me and didn't want me and was glad to have me out of her life,” Martinez told KRQE. That belief carried on for four decades until Martinez, 45, recently created a Facebook profile for herself. A few months later her siblings were reaching out to her with a very different story. Rather than abandoning her, Martinez learned, her mother had in fact been trying to locate her all this time. At first, Martinez ignored the messages from her oldest sister. “I kind of had my life already made," she told the U.K. Daily Mail. “I didn't know if I wanted to open that up.” But when a friend got in touch with the family in Costa Rica and explained the true timeline of events, Martinez decided to respond. Her siblings put Martinez in touch with her mom, now about to turn 80, and the pair met on Thursday in Albuquerque. “The first time that I heard my mother's voice was something really emotional for me, because she told me, ‘I still see you as a little girl,’” Martinez said. “I can’t believe it.” Martinez says she still doesn’t know why her father took her away from Costa Rica and why he never allowed her to reunite with the rest of her family. She says she hasn’t been in touch with him for several years. Martinez, who has four daughters, said she's planning to introduce them to their grandmother for the first time. And the timing of the visit presents another rare opportunity: Martinez plans to host a joint birthday celebration for her daughter’s 18th birthday and her mother’s 80th. “I get to see and hold my mom for the first time since I was a little girl,” she said.
GIRLS WADE THROUGH A STREET
SOAR BEYOND YOUR FEARS !!! Once there was a king who received a gift of two magnificent falcons from Arabia. They were peregrine falcons, the most beautiful birds he had ever seen. He gave the precious birds to his head falconer to be trained. Months passed and one day the head falconer informed the king that though one of the falcons was flying majestically, soaring high in the sky, the other bird had not moved from its branch since the day it had arrived. The king summoned healers and sorcerers from all the land to tend to the falcon, but no one could make the bird fly. He presented the task to the member of his court, but the next day, the king saw through the palace window that the bird had still not moved from its perch. Having tried everything else, the king thought to himself, "May be I need someone more familiar with the countryside to understand the nature of this problem." So he cried out to his court, "Go and get a farmer." In the morning, the king was thrilled to see the falcon soaring high above the palace gardens. He said to his court, "Bring me the doer of this miracle." The court quickly located the farmer, who came and stood before the king. The king asked him, "How did you make the falcon fly?" With his head bowed, the farmer said to the king, " It was very easy, your highness. I simply cut the branch where the bird was sitting." We are all made to fly -- to realize our incredible potential as human beings. But instead of doing that, we sit on our branches, clinging to the things that are familiar to us. The possibilities are endless, but for most of us, they remain undiscovered. We conform to the familiar, the comfortable, the mundane. So for the most part, our lives are mediocre instead of exciting, thrilling and fulfilling. So let us learn to destroy the branch of fear we cling to and free ourselves to the glory of flight.
No Stone Unturned The congregation of our small stone church decided that the stone which formed the step up to the front door had become too worn by its years of use, and would have to be replaced. As a sign of the faithfulness of members over the years, the stone had a pronounced dip in the middle, well-worn by parishioners entering and leaving the chapel. Unfortunately, there were hardly any funds available for the replacement. Then someone came up with the bright idea that the replacement could be postponed for many years by simply turning the block of stone over.We discovered that their great-grandparents had beaten us to it.