Research Consortium on Nearby Stars
The Research Consortium on Nearby Stars (RECONS) is a project to investigate the stars nearest to the Solar System - those within 10 parsecs (32.6 light years).
Nearby Stars by Brightness, Spectra, and Distance
The following celestial objects are located within 10 parsecs, 32.6 light-years (ly), of Sol.
Nearby Stars.
Before the invention of the telescope the stars were regarded as merely a convenient backdrop for scanning the wanderings of the sun, moon, and planets.
Nearby Stars, Star
References
United States Government Printing Office. "Bright Stars, J2000.5." The Astronomical Almanac for the Year 2000. Washington, DC: Navy Dept., Naval Observatory, Nautical Almanac Office, pp. H2-H31, 2000.
Distances to Nearby Stars and Their Motions; from the University of Washington contains a useful explanation of parallax and the distance scale.
Solar System
Nearby Stars, Our Galaxy
Galaxies and the Universe
Lengths : AU, light year, parsec
Angles : degree, arcmin, arcsec
Units, Powers of 10 (Appendix A) ...
Stellar parallaxes are seen when we view nearby stars from opposite sides of the Earth's orbit. parsec (pc): distance at which an object would have a parallax of one arc second. Equals approximately 3.
Bruce Campbell of the Dominion Astrophysical Observatory in Victoria, British Columbia has studied a number of nearby stars, looking for subtle shifts in radial velocity.
A reflection nebula is a nebula that glows as the dust in it reflects the light of nearby stars. These nebulae are frequently bluish in color because blue light is more efficiently reflected than red light.
Comparison with nearby stars makes the eclipse very noticeable to the naked eye. In between the primary eclipses is a secondary eclipse a third the depth of the primary.
More short-distance calls are being made by Zaitsev, who has taken it upon himself to try to initiate contact between worlds, overseeing the broadcast of four different messages to a handful of nearby stars using the 70-metre radio telescope at ...
By observing this parallax of the nearby stars against the distant stars over the course of a year, one can derive the distance of a star in units of AU. In astronomy, we have a unit specifically geared to this method: the parsec.
Dust expelled from an exploding star engulfs a cluster of nearby stars in this false-color image from two space-based observatories.
Gravitational interaction with nearby stars and galactic tides modified cometary orbits to make them more circular. This explains the nearly spherical shape of the outer Oort cloud.
The "standard" main sequence is obtained from H"R diagrams of stars whose distances can be measured by (geometric) parallax, so the method of spectroscopic parallax is calibrated using nearby stars.
The measurement of stellar parallax of nearby stars provides a fundamental baseline in the cosmic distance ladder that is used to measure the scale of the universe.
Angular positions can be used to determine the distances to nearby stars and to study the motions of stars in our galaxy. Distances are of fundamental importance in astrophysics, and the only direct method of measuring them is by triangulation.
Once we know how big an AU is, you can start to find the distances to nearby stars (using the parallax method), then the distances to more distant stars (using the properties of the nearby stars and methods such as spectroscopic parallax), ...
The stellar population that contains the Sun and most other nearby stars. Most of its stars have a scale height of 1000 light-years and orbit the Galaxy on fairly circular orbits.
Among nearby stars, it has been found that population I stars have generally lower velocities than older, population II stars. The latter have elliptical orbits that are inclined to the plane of the galaxy.
ISM absorption line measurements of the spectra of relatively nearby stars were used to show conclusively that there is a local cavity in the HI of the Galactic disk which surrounds the Sun (but is unrelated to the Sun).
If the Earth orbited the Sun then positions of nearby stars, compared to the background, should change. However, initial observations did not detect any such motion.
Only a few objects, mainly local objects like planets and some nearby stars, are blueshifted. This is because our Universe is expanding. The redshift of an object can be measured by examining the absorption or emission lines in its spectrum.
Of course it is not just the nearby stars one could look at with a telescope. In fact, the main drive behind aperture fever is a desire to see fainter and fainter galaxies and other extragalactic objects.
Chart showing path of Mercury and nearby stars in July.
VENUS rises less than an hour before the Sun at the beginning of July, so it will be a very low object to the northeast in the morning sky just before sunrise.
MOP was planned as a long-term effort, performing a "Targeted Search" of 800 specific nearby stars, along with a general "Sky Survey" to scan the sky.
Parallax, also called trigonometric parallax, is used to determine the distance to nearby stars. As the Earth's position changes during its yearly orbit around the Sun, the apparent locations of nearby stars slightly shift.
Astrometrical observation of nearby stars, for example, is one of the techniques used to search for the presence of unseen companions, such as extrasolar planets, low-luminosity stars, and brown dwarfs.
PARALLAX - Small periodic shift of the apparent positions of nearby stars due to the changing position of the Earth as it orbits the Sun. The nearer the star is, the larger the shift.
There is now good evidence of Jupiter-sized objects orbiting several nearby stars. What conditions allow the formation of terrestrial planets?
These last two effects combine to reduce the light contributed by distant galaxies to our nighttime skies to insignificance, leaving only the nearby stars which we see as points of light in a darkened sky.
Parallax - measuring distances to nearby stars
Cepheids - measuring distances in our Galaxy and to nearby galaxies
Supernovae - measuring distances to other galaxies
Redshift and Hubble's Law - measuring distances to objects far, far away ...
Parallax An apparent shift in the positions of nearby stars (relative to more distant ones) from the changing position of the Earth in its orbit around the Sun. The size of the shift can be used to measure the distances to the nearer stars.
Note that this list is continually changing as astronomers discover nearby stars with ever more sensitive detectors in a variety of spectral ranges, especially the infrared, where numerous small stars emit their energy.
Apex - The direction in the sky toward which the Sun is moving. Because of the Sun's motion, nearby stars appear to diverge from the apex
Aphelion - The point in the orbit of a solar system body where it is farthest from the Sun ...
Note on nearest star systems: light year distances taken from parallax data determined by the Research Consortium on Nearby Stars (or Recons).
After locating the correct star field, it was possible to see something extremely dim quite close to the position where Himalia should have been, but it seemed dimmer than 15th magnitude in comparison to nearby stars.
Several of the bright blue nearby stars are very massive, each weighing about six times that of the sun. Their ages are around 12 million years, and they are members of the same generation as the star that went supernova.
Deviations in the proper motions--motions relative to the background of apparently fixed, distant stars--of several nearby stars indicate that they may be accompanied by dark, planetlike bodies too faint to be seen directly from the Earth.
The older part of the thin-disk population, ranging in age from about 1 to 10 billion years. The Sun and most other nearby stars belong to the old thin disk. The scale height of the old thin disk is about 1000 light-years. [C95]
Omega ...
reflection nebula
A nebula which is illuminated by reflecting the light of nearby stars.
reflector
A telescope which uses a parabolic mirror at its base to collect light and focus it into an eyepiece for viewing.
in which Q is the (linear) rotational velocity and R is the distance from the disk center, both evaluated in this case at our galactocentric distance R0. Nearby stars will show systematic patterns in radial velocity vr and proper motion parallel to ...
It seems that the Arabs visualized Vega and its two nearby stars Epsilon and Zeta Lyrae as an eagle with folded wings, swooping down in its prey, ...
In recent years, astronomers have observed such subtle wobbles in the motions of quite a few nearby stars, and concluded that like the Sun, they had planets, too--big planets, like Jupiter.
It's multicolouredness is caused by the many different processes happening here. Present are both reflection nebulae, and emission nebulae. There are also many dust clouds present, that are lighted up by nearby stars, (like Antares).
Since such a ship might take from as little as below a hundred years to tens or even hundreds of thousands of years to reach even nearby stars, the original occupants might either grow old or die during t...
, the Bellerophon. (Tony Todd ...
led the Dutch astronomer Jan Oort to hypothesize the existance of a cloud of icy objects existing far outside the solar system but well within the Sun's gravitational influence. Collisions between comets or gravitational nudges by nearby stars ...
This is a simple method to measure the distances between us and nearby stars. However, we cannot measure many stars by this method because the angle is very small. For larger distances, we have to use other methods of measurement.
appearance have been noted with repeated observations from ground- and space-based observatories. We, as a scientific community, know the planets quite well, enough to make predictions on the possibility of finding planets around other nearby stars.
This distance is also the place where perturbations resulting from the passage of nearby stars begin to be felt.
reflection nebulae (NASA Thesaurus) Any celestial body having a hazy cloudy appearance whose brightness results from the scattering by dust particles of light from nearby stars. reflectivity (NASA SP-7, 1965) 1.
 See also: Earth, Light, Star, Solar, Planet
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