---
title: "Barnard's Star: facts, distance and size – Krillion Space"
description: "Barnard's Star is a small, old red dwarf and the closest single star to the Sun. Its size, distance, place on the route and sourced facts."
url: https://krilion.app/atlas/barnards-star
language: en-US
---

# Barnard's Star

Red dwarf. Depth 21 on the Krillion Space voyage, in the Nearby stars.

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.

![Barnard's Star at depth 21 in Krillion Space, painted by the game (an illustration, not a photograph).](https://krilion.app/assets/atlas/barnards-star.webp)

## 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](https://astrobiology.nasa.gov/news/barnards-star/))
- 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](https://www.eso.org/public/news/eso1837/))
- 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](https://www.eso.org/public/news/eso2414/))
- 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](https://noirlab.edu/public/news/noirlab2510/))
- 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](https://arxiv.org/abs/2503.08095))

## Sources

- [ESO – Scientists discover planet orbiting closest single star to our Sun (eso2414)](https://www.eso.org/public/news/eso2414/)
- [NOIRLab – Planetary System Found Around Nearest Single Star (noirlab2510)](https://noirlab.edu/public/news/noirlab2510/)
- [Basant et al. 2025, ApJL – Four sub-Earth planets orbiting Barnard's Star (arXiv)](https://arxiv.org/abs/2503.08095)
- [NASA Astrobiology – Barnard's Star](https://astrobiology.nasa.gov/news/barnards-star/)

## On the route

- Previous landmark: [Proxima Centauri b](https://krilion.app/atlas/proxima-b)
- Next landmark: [Sirius](https://krilion.app/atlas/sirius)
- [The whole Star Atlas](https://krilion.app/atlas)
- [Fly the voyage yourself](https://krilion.app/d/): every right answer warps your ship one stop deeper.