Virtual Babelsberg Starry Night

On Thursday, starting at 6 p.m., Dr. Ralf-Dieter Scholz's lecture on the topic "Brown dwarfs and red dwarf stars in the local environment of our Sun" from the Babelsberg Starry Night series will be online here.

The stars in the immediate vicinity of the Sun are mostly cool red dwarf stars. Also cool is the search for still hidden, inconspicuous cosmic neighbours. There is an astonishing amount of stars to discover, especially extremely faint brown dwarfs. Among the discoveries of recent years is Scholz's Star, which not long ago approached the Sun up to a distance five times closer than today's known nearest neighbour, Proxima Centauri. Further cosmic encounters are being detected and predicted with the help of the European space telescope Gaia.

This season, the Babelsberg Starry Nights will not take place on site at the AIP, but will come straight to your home: on the 3rd Thursday of each month from 6 p.m. the lectures are available at

https://www.aip.de/babelsberger-sternennaechte

and can be viewed at any time afterwards.