It was once hoped that it might contain planets around it, and astronomers made many attempts to try and spot them. Unfortunately, it appears to have none.
Astronomers will keep looking, of course, but it doesn't seem too likely that it contains planetary neighbors. Barnard's star is located in the direction of the constellation Ophiuchus. Here's an interesting bit of trivia about this star: it was the location of an epic battle on the television series "Star Trek: The Next Generation," where the cyborg-human Borg race and the Federation fought for control of the galaxy.
Most Trekkies know the name of this star and what it means to the Trekiverse. In reality, Wolf is located only 7. It looks pretty dim to observers. In fact, to be able to see it, they have to use telescopes. It's not visible to the naked eye. That's because Wolf is a faint red dwarf star. It's located in the direction of the constellation Leo. Located in the constellation Ursa Major , Lalande is a faint red dwarf that, like many of the stars in this list, is too dim to be seen with the naked eye.
However, that hasn't kept astronomers from studying it. That's because it may well have planets orbiting it. Understanding its planetary system would give more clues to how such worlds form and evolve around older stars.
As close as it is at a distance of 8. Still, astronomers will keep checking on possible worlds and their habitability for life. Nearly everyone knows about Sirius. It's the brightest star in our night sky and has been, at times in our history, used as a harbinger of planting by the Egyptians, and a predictor of seasonal change by other civilizations. Sirius is actually a binary star system containing Sirius A and Sirius B and lies 8. It is known more commonly as the Dog Star.
Sirius B is a white dwarf, a celestial object that will be left behind once our Sun reaches the end of its life. Located in the constellation Cetus, this binary star system is 8. It is also known as Gliese 65 and is a binary star system.
One of the members of the system is a flare star and it varies in brightness over time. The star is named for Willem Jacob Luyten, who helped determine its proper motion. It regularly increases its surface brightness by an entire order of magnitude in a matter of minutes, then quickly dims down for a short time.
Located in the constellation Sagittarius , it is actually a close neighbor of Barnard's star. The American astronomer Frank Elmore Ross first cataloged it in as part of his search for variable stars. Ross is about It was also cataloged by Frank Elmore Ross. As Phil Plaitt, from Bad Astronomy says, " They change positions, slowly, but measurably. This animation by Frog Rock Observatory shows the movement of Barnard's Star across the sky from to Barnard's Star is approaching the Sun so rapidly that around 11, AD, it will be 3.
Garcia-Sanchez, et al, The Voyager 1 spacecraft is on an interstellar mission. It is traveling away from the Sun at a rate of If Voyager were to travel to Proxima Centauri, at this rate, it would take over 73, years to arrive. If we could travel at the speed of light, an impossibility due to Special Relativity, it would still take 4. According to Special Relativity the mass of an object increases as its speed increases, and approaches infinity as the object's speed approaches the speed of light.
This means that it would take an infinite amount of energy to accelerate an object to the speed of light. There's no fundamental reason why we can't get as close to the speed of light as we like, provided we have enough energy.
But this is probably far in the future. Today, high-powered telescopes offer even more granular data on our cosmic neighborhood. Our closest neighboring stars are all part of the same solar system: Alpha Centauri.
This triple star system — consisting of Proxima Centauri, Alpha Centauri A, and Alpha Centauri B — attracts a lot of interest because it hosts planets, including one that may be similar to Earth.
The planet, Proxima Centauri b, is a lot closer to its star than Earth is to the Sun. To put these vast distances into perspective, if the Voyager spacecraft were to travel to Proxima Centauri, it would take over 73, years to finally arrive.
Here are the top 10 stars in terms of visual brightness from Earth:. Sirius, which is about 25 times more luminous than the sun, visually punctuates the constellation Canis Major. The next step in learning more about our surroundings in the cosmos will be seeing which of the stars listed above have planets orbiting them.
So far, the 44 stars in the infographic have over 40 planets scattered among them, though new discoveries are made all the time. With each new mission and discovery, we learn a little bit more about our pocket of the universe. Conventional cartographic techniques have caused many to have a skewed perception of the true size of countries. Can an equal-area map provide clarity?
Maps shape our understanding of the world—and in an increasingly interconnected and global economy, this geographic knowledge is more important than ever.
Unfortunately, billions of people around the world have a skewed perception of the true size of countries thanks to a cartographic technique called the Mercator projection.
In , the great cartographer, Gerardus Mercator, created a revolutionary new map based on a cylindrical projection. The new map was well-suited to nautical navigation since every line on the sphere is a constant course, or loxodrome.
In modern times, this is particularly useful since the Earth can be depicted in a seamless way in online mapping applications. That said, in this projection style, the sizes of landmasses become increasingly distorted the further away from the equator they get. Canada is the second largest country in the world, but not by much.
Africa, South Asia, and South America all appear much smaller in relation to countries further from the equator. And from a North American perspective, countries such as Australia and Indonesia appear much smaller than they actually are. Comparing the landmasses on the same latitude as Canada helps put sizes into perspective.
In reality, Greenland is about fourteen times smaller than Africa. Critics of the map—and similar projections—suggest that distortion reinforces a sense of colonialist superiority. As well, the amount of territory a country occupies is often correlated with power and access to natural resources, and map distortions can have the effect of inadvertently diminishing nations closer to the equator.
In our society we unconsciously equate size with importance and even power. Growing awareness of map distortion is translating into concrete change. Boston public schools, for example, recently switched to the Gall-Peters projection , which more accurately depicts the true size of landmasses.
As well, Google, whose map app is used by approximately one billion people per month, took the bold step of using different projections for different purposes in
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