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We present the discovery of a previously unknown very nearby star - LHS 2090 at a distance of only d=6 pc. In order to find nearby (i.e. d < 25 pc) red dwarfs, we re-identified high proper motion stars ($μ>$ 0.18 arcsec/yr) from the NLTT catalogue (Luyten {luyten7980}) in optical Digitized Sky Survey data for two different epochs and in the 2MASS data base. Only proper motion stars with large R-Kₛ colour index and with relatively bright infrared magnitudes (Kₛ<10) were selected for follow-up spectroscopy. The low-resolution spectrum of LHS 2090 and its large proper motion (0.79 arcsec/yr) classify this star as an M6.5 dwarf. The resulting spectroscopic distance estimate from comparing the infrared JHKₛ magnitudes of LHS 2090 with absolute magnitudes of M6.5 dwarfs is 6.0±1.1 pc assuming an uncertainty in absolute magnitude of ±0.4 mag.
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Scholz et al. (2001) studied this question.