Depth 21 · Red dwarf

Barnard's Star

Barnard's Star is a small, old red dwarf and the closest single star to the Sun. It moves across our sky faster than any other star, and after a century of disputed claims, astronomers confirmed in 2024 and 2025 that it hosts four small planets.

Fact sheet

Type: Red dwarf (M4-type main-sequence star)
Distance: About 6.0 light-years from the Sun
Size: About 0.16 times the Sun's mass and 0.19 times its radius
Constellation: Ophiuchus
Position in the sky: Right ascension 17h 58m, declination +4° 41′
Seeing it from Earth: Too faint to see with the naked eye, but an amateur telescope of about 8 inches aperture will show it in Ophiuchus, best placed in the evening sky during northern summer.
On the voyage: Depth 21, in the Nearby stars section of the route, between Proxima Centauri b and Sirius

Things to know

E. E. Barnard measured the star's unusually fast motion across the sky in 1916, about 10.3 arcseconds per year, likely the fastest apparent motion of any star in our sky. NASA
It shifts across the sky by the width of the full Moon roughly every 180 years, and it is probably about twice as old as the Sun. ESO
A planet claimed around the star in 2018 did not hold up; instead, in 2024 ESO's ESPRESSO instrument found Barnard b, a planet with at least half the mass of Venus that orbits in just over three days with a surface temperature of about 125 °C. ESO
In March 2025 a team using the MAROON-X instrument on Gemini North, combined with ESPRESSO data, confirmed three more planets, bringing the total to four, each with roughly 20 to 30% of Earth's mass. NOIRLab
All four planets orbit in about 2 to 7 days, far too close to their star to be habitable, and one of them, Barnard e, vies with Proxima d as the lowest-mass planet found by the radial-velocity method. arXiv

Sources

Reach depth 21 on a voyage to fly past Barnard's Star yourself. Every right answer warps your ship one stop deeper.

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