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 ( \mu > 0.18 arcsec/yr ) from the NLTT catalogue ( Luyten [ 1979-1980 ] ) 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 ( 0.79 arcsec/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 \pm 1.1 pc assuming an uncertainty in absolute magnitude of \pm 0.4 mag .