The twin brown dwarf stars of Luhman 16AB move together and around each other as they cross the sky in their orbital dance. A NASA/ESA Italian-led research team used three years of high-precision Hubble images to map the progressive movement and position across the sky of the dwarf stars. The resulting progressive image map shows how the dwarfs move through the sky and orbit around each other. The detail of Hubble Space Telescope’s high-precision astrometry images disproves earlier indications of an unseen exoplanet in the system, as reported in Science Daily.
During the initial excitement following the 2013 discovery of Luhman 16AB, the European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope (ESO) took fine incremental measurements of the dwarf stars’ positions from April to June 2013, as reported in Sci News. Very small correlated deviations to the expected motion of the dwarfs’ paths suggested the presence of a companion in the system capable of perturbing the motion of the two dwarf stars. It was suggested by the ESO team, led by Dr. Henri Boffin, that the companion might be an exoplanet (not another star). Three years of Hubble high-resolution, high-precision astrometry images shows conclusively that the Luhman twin brown dwarf stars are dancing their intricate dance alone across the sky, without a companion in their system.
Discovered in 2013 by Professor Kevin Luhman of Pennsylvania State University, the Luhman 16AB binary system of twin brown dwarf stars is 6.5 light-years from our Sun. The Alpha Centauri triple-star system, comprised of the binary Alpha Centauri A and B pair and the closer Proxima Centauri star, is the nearest neighbor to our Sun, lying 4.4 and 4.2 light-years away. In between the Luhman and Alpha Centauri systems lies Barnard’s star at 6.0 light-years away.
