On a more ambitious evening I may try and analyze the relationship between navel gazing and star gazing. RedOrbit links to a picture from the Chilean Very Large Telescope ESO showing a brown dwarf hanging out in our corner of the cosmos.
The Suns New Exotic Neighbor: At a time when astronomers are peering into the most distant Universe, looking at objects as far as 13 billion light-years away, one may think that our close neighbourhood would be very well known. Not so. Astronomers still find new star-like objects in our immediate vicinity.Astronomers have been avidly trying to peer back to the beginning of time which is the holy grail of universal inquiry, but they have also been working at the mundane tasks of actually trying to catalog our companions of the moment. There is a list maintained of The 100 Nearest Stars in mind numbing technical detail. In a nice touch they also keep a short list of those heavenly bodies that have been recently kicked off.
The Nearby Methane Rich Brown Dwarf of the article raises the question of whether cows exist in outer space. “Sometimes I think we're alone in the universe, and sometimes I think we're not. In either case the idea is quite staggering”. - Arthur C. Clarke
