Space has a way of surprising us even when we think we have already mapped the neighbourhood. Astronomers have spent decades cataloguing the stars closest to Earth, and most researchers assumed that anything within 65 light-years was reasonably well understood. Turns out, four stars had been hiding there the whole time, and nobody noticed.
A team from the University of Warwick and the University of Colorado Boulder has directly observed four white dwarf stars for the first time, all of them sitting quietly in binary systems within our immediate cosmic vicinity. The findings have been published in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.
