Thanks for the heads up – saw a brief mention of this in the TV ad for SBS news.
> The star, with the catchy name SMSS J031300.36 2670839.3
The “J” means that it shines mostly in infra-red, in the J band of the electromagnetic spectrum. The numbers after the J give its position in the sky. But what’s SMSS? That’s a new one for me. If it was SDSS then it would make sense, SDSS is the famous Sloan Digital Sky Survey.
SMSS may stand for SkyMapper Star Survey or SkyMapper Siding Springs. Info on the Australian SkyMapper telescope is on http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SkyMapper
“SkyMapper is a fully automated 1.35m wide-angle optical telescope at Siding Spring Observatory in northern New South Wales, Australia. It is one of the telescopes of the Research School of Astronomy and Astrophysics of the Australian National University (ANU). The telescope has a compact modified Cassegrain design with a large 0.69 m secondary mirror, which gives it a very wide field of view: its single, dedicated instrument, a 268-million pixel imaging camera, can photograph 5.7 square degrees of sky. The camera has six filters which span from ultraviolet to near infrared wavelengths.”
“The SkyMapper telescope was built to carry out the Southern Sky Survey, which will image the entire southern sky several times over in SkyMapper’s six spectral filters over the course of five years. This survey will be analogous to the Sloan Digital Sky Survey of the Northern hemisphere sky. It has several enhancements, including temporal coverage, more precise measurements of stellar properties and coverage of large parts of the plane of the Galaxy.
The telescope and its camera were built by the ANU as a successor to the Great Melbourne Telescope at Mount Stromlo after that telescope was burnt in the 2003 Canberra bushfires.”
Other important stars also have “catchy” names, such as the third nearest star system WISE J104915.57-531906.1
> The star, which is drifting around the outskirts of the Milky Way around 6000 light years from Earth
Aha, a Halo star.