Editing Teegarden's Star (section)

== Discovery ==
[[File:Teegarden's star proper motion.gif|thumb|left|Teegarden's star showing proper motion at two year intervals]]
Teegarden's Star was discovered in 2003 using [[asteroid]]-tracking data that had been collected years earlier. This data set is a digital archive created from optical images taken over a five-year period by the [[Near-Earth Asteroid Tracking]] (NEAT) program using two 1&nbsp;m telescopes on [[Maui]], [[Hawaii]]. The star is named after the discovery team leader, [[Bonnard J. Teegarden]], an [[Astrophysics|astrophysicist]] at [[NASA]]'s [[Goddard Space Flight Center]].<ref name=disc/>

Astronomers have long thought it was quite likely that many undiscovered dwarf stars exist within 20 light-years of Earth, because stellar-population surveys show the count of known nearby dwarf stars to be lower than otherwise expected and these stars are dim and easily overlooked. Teegarden's team thought that these dim stars might be found by [[data mining]] some of the huge optical sky survey data sets taken by various programs for other purposes in previous years. So they reexamined the NEAT asteroid tracking data set and found this star. The star was then [[precovery|precovered]] on photographic plates from the [[National Geographic Society – Palomar Observatory Sky Survey|Palomar Sky Survey]] taken in 1951. This discovery is significant as the team did not have direct access to any telescopes and did not include professional astronomers at the time of the discovery.<ref name=disc />