2001A&A...374L..12S

We present the discovery of a previously unknown very nearby star - LHS 2090 at a distance of only d=6pc. In order to find nearby (i.e. d<25pc) red dwarfs, we re-identified high proper motion stars (µ>0.18arcsec/yr) from the NLTT catalogue (Luyten, 1979-1980, NLTT catalog, I/98) in optical Digitized Sky Survey data for two different epochs and in the 2MASS data base. Only proper motion stars with large R-K_s colour index and with relatively bright infrared magnitudes (K_s<10) were selected for follow-up spectroscopy. The low-resolution spectrum of LHS 2090 and its large proper motion (0.79arcsec/yr) classify this star as an M6.5 dwarf. The resulting spectroscopic distance estimate from comparing the infrared JHK_s magnitudes of LHS 2090 with absolute magnitudes of M6.5 dwarfs is 6.0±1.1pc assuming an uncertainty in absolute magnitude of ±0.4mag.