Brown dwarf binary discovered at 2 parsecs

[granthutchison]

A very nearby pair of brown dwarfs:
http://arxiv.org/abs/1303.2401

I've added a provisional entry to nearstars.stc:
http://celestia.svn.sourceforge.net/vie ... threv=5225

Grant

[Hungry4info]

The two are certainly members of the same system (same proper motion and distance). They are separated by ~3 AU.

[granthutchison]

It's an isolated pair of brown dwarfs, orbiting each other. That's not unusual.
The pair is in the southern constellation Vela. If the distance and proper motion in the discovery paper are correct, they're moving across our line of sight at about 27km/s.

Grant

[granthutchison]

Do you have other examples ?

If you have a current version of nearstars.stc, you can find a lot of isolated brown dwarfs in the vicinity of the sun. For example, look at WISE 1506+7027, DENIS 0817-6155, LP 944-20, DENIS 0255-4700 (just a few I pulled out while scrolling through the database).
We've been discovering binary brown dwarf systems for a decade or a more, and some are close enough to be in nearstars.stc. Apart from the one I just added, there's another isolated pair in Celestia: 2MASS 0939-2448 A&B, which are such dim T dwarfs you need to go pretty close before you see them. Also there's CI Ind - a brown dwarf binary that's probably in orbit around Epsilon Indi, though it lies more than a thousand AU from the star.

OK but towards the sun or in the opposite direction ?

If you take a look at the discovery paper for the WISE J104915.57-531906.1 binary, you'll see they don't report the radial motion.