* Astronomy

imagine two tennis balls separated by 180 miles--yet still in orbit around each other. That's an accurate scale model for a remarkable pair of red stars which astronomers have discovered in the constellation Phoenix. The double star is the widest very low mass binary ever seen and may shed new light on how the smallest stars are born.
Étienne Artigau of Gemini Observatory in Chile; David Lafrenière, René Doyon, Daniel Nadeau, and Jasmin Robert of the University of Montreal; and Loïc Albert of the Canada-France-Hawaii Telescope compared positions in the 2MASS point source catalogue with images from the Digitised Sky Survey.
The astronomers discovered two faint stars--named 2MASS J012655.49-502238.8 and 2MASS J012702.83-502321.1--moving across the sky together, despite a separation of 82 arcseconds. Follow-up observations with telescopes in Chile revealed that both stars are much cooler than the Sun. Their spectral types are M6.5 and M8.
At visual wavelengths, each star is 22nd magnitude. That's 2.5 million times fainter than the unaided eye can see and more than a thousand times fainter than Pluto. The stars are even fainter than Eris.

Read more