Teegarden’s Star is a very faint red dwarf in Aries, found only in the age of digital sky surveys, with small planets among the most Earth-like known.
At a glance
| type | red dwarf (class M) |
|---|---|
| distance from the Sun | 12.5 light-years (3.83 pc) |
| its light left it | 12.5 years ago |
| luminosity | 0.00073 × the Sun |
| radius | 0.12 × the Sun |
| surface temperature | 2,640 K |
Read off the piece’s own catalogue, the same values it draws with.
About Teegarden's Star
Teegarden’s Star is one of the smallest and coolest stars near the Sun, so faint that it went unnoticed until a team led by Bonnard Teegarden found it in archived images from a NASA search for asteroids, by spotting a faint point that had moved between exposures. Its discovery showed that very dim neighbours could still be missing from the census.
Measurements of the star’s wobble with the CARMENES spectrograph revealed planets of roughly the Earth’s mass orbiting close in. Because the star is so dim, the inner planet receives an amount of light similar to what the Earth gets from the Sun, and on simple measures of size and warmth it ranks among the most Earth-like planets yet found.
What you see in the piece
Fly to it and its planets circle a small, deep-red disc on their measured orbits; press O to draw them. In HUMAN EYE nothing shows in this part of Aries.
Measured or modelled
The planets’ masses are lower limits, and nothing is known of their atmospheres; “Earth-like” here means size and received light only.
Questions
Does Teegarden’s Star have habitable planets?
Its inner planet receives a similar amount of light to the Earth, but whether it is habitable is unknown. The star is 12.5 light-years (3.83 pc) away.