Good things come in...

... small packages

(I posted much of the following content 4 years ago to the late and sadly-unlamented HAL Forum. It deserves a second look.)

At a distance of 14.1 light years, Van Maanen's Star in Pisces is the third closest white dwarf to the Sun, and the closest that is not a member of a binary system (Sirius B and Procyon B). This means its faint luminosity is not overwhelmed by a much brighter neighbor, and despite its 12.374 magnitude, it is therefore much easier to see.

Like all white dwarfs, Van Maanen's Star packs a lot of mass into a very tiny pace. With a diameter only slightly larger than the Earth's, it nevertheless has nearly two thirds of the sun's mass crammed into that tiny volume. It is believed that Van Maanen's Star began its life a little over 4 billion years ago as a main sequence star with approximately 2.6 solar masses. After a relatively brief time (less than a billion years), it swelled up into a red supergiant with a circumference roughly equivalent to Jupiter's orbit in our own Solar System, before collapsing upon itself into a white dwarf about 3 billion years ago.

Most intriguing is the star's abnormally high metallicity for a white dwarf. Astronomers speculate that perhaps a rocky, Earthlike companion to the star crashed onto its surface in the (astronomically) recent past, thus "polluting" its spectrum with the anomalous heavy elements.

Van Maanen's star is not too difficult to locate, but a real challenge to positively identify. For all you starhoppers out there, start by finding the 4.43 magnitude star Delta Piscium (Linteum), off of the southwest corner of the Great Square. Pass by two 6th magnitude stars to the immediate southeast of Delta Piscium, making a dogleg to the south-southwest to find the 5.75 magnitude star HD 4628, which sits squarely on the Ecliptic. About one-half full moon to the northwest of HD 4628 you'll see an anonymous 10th magnitude star, the brightest thing in the immediate vicinity. Van Maanen's Star lies due south of this last-mentioned beacon, about one-third of the distance between it and HD 4628.

For those of you with go-to, the coordinates for Van Maanan's Star are 
Right Ascension 00^h 49^m 09.90175^s and Declination +05° 23′ 19.0117″.

So if you haven't yet laid eyes on a white dwarf, this is your best chance for doing so! At the time of writing this, Van Maanen's star will be best situated for viewing any time after about 10 PM or so (9 PM after daylight saving time ends). I wouldn't attempt to see it with the Moon in the sky, however!