Bonnard J. Teegarden

The discovery of Teegarden's star came as somewhat of a surprise as no close-by stars had been discovered for many decades. Teegarden's team found this star in data taken years earlier by an unrelated program searching for near-Earth asteroids.[2] The real excitement was from the initial measurements the team made for the parallax of this star. These initial measurements indicated that the star may be very close at a distance of about seven light-years. This would have made it the third-closest star system. This excitement resulted in numerous popular press articles and public interest.[7] In the years since the discovery was announced the measured distances gradually increased. The accepted distance is now more than twelve light-years and public interest has faded somewhat, but not before Teegarden was rewarded with the name of this newly discovered star, although other designations are sometimes used as well.[8]

Teegarden was a cosmic ray researcher at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center for all of his professional life. He was co-investigator on the Pioneer Jupiter cosmic ray experiments[9] and later an investigator on the space based INTEGRAL[10] and BATSE experiments.[11] He was also involved in studies of stellar nucleosynthesis.[12] He is a prolific researcher with 200 articles listed in SAO/NASA Astrophysics Data System.[13]