Looking for Scholz's star

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WISE 0720-0846 (full designation name WISE J072003.20-084651.2, also known as Scholz's Star after its discoverer ) is a binary system about 17–23 light-years (5.1–7.2 parsecs) from the Sun in the southern constellation Monoceros near the Galactic plane.[1] The primary is a red dwarf with a stellar classification of M9 ± 1 and has 86 ± 2 Jupiter masses.[1] The secondary is probably a T5 brown dwarf with 65 ± 12 Jupiter masses.[1] The system has 0.15 solar masses.[1] The pair orbit at a distance of about 0.8 astronomical units (120,000,000 kilometers; 74,000,000 miles).[1] The system has an apparent magnitude of 18.3,[1] and is estimated to be 3-10 billion years old.[1]

It is estimated that the WISE 0720-0846 system passed about 52,000 AU (0.25 pc; 0.8 light-years) from the Sun about 70,000 years ago.[1] Comets perturbed from the Oort cloud would require roughly 2 million years to get to the inner Solar System.[1] At closest approach the star woud have had an apparent magnitude of about 10.3.[1] Such close approaches are expected to occur every 100,000 years or so.[1]

The star was first discovered to be a nearby star by astronomer Ralf-Dieter Scholz, announced on arXiv in November 2013, and has been nicknamed Scholz's star.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scholz's_Star
 
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