GJ 526 (Lalande 25372, Wolf 498) is a

red dwarf ''Red Dwarf'' is a British science fiction comedy franchise created by Rob Grant and Doug Naylor, which primarily consists of a television sitcom that aired on BBC Two between 1988 and 1999, and on Dave since 2009, gaining a cult following. T ...

star in the northern

constellation A constellation is an area on the celestial sphere in which a group of visible stars forms Asterism (astronomy), a perceived pattern or outline, typically representing an animal, mythological subject, or inanimate object. The origins of the e ...

Boötes Boötes ( ) is a constellation in the northern sky, located between 0° and +60° declination, and 13 and 16 hours of right ascension on the celestial sphere. The name comes from la, Boōtēs, which comes from grc-gre, Βοώτης, Boṓtēs ...

. It has an apparent visual magnitude of 8.5, which is too faint to be seen with the naked eye. Based upon an annual

parallax Parallax is a displacement or difference in the apparent position of an object viewed along two different lines of sight and is measured by the angle or semi-angle of inclination between those two lines. Due to foreshortening, nearby objects ...

shift of 0.184 arc seconds as measured by the

Hipparcos ''Hipparcos'' was a scientific satellite of the European Space Agency (ESA), launched in 1989 and operated until 1993. It was the first space experiment devoted to precision astrometry, the accurate measurement of the positions of celestial obj ...

satellite, this system is from Earth.

History of observations

This star is known at least from 1801, when it was included to Lalande's stellar catalogue ''

Histoire céleste française ''Histoire céleste française'' (''French Celestial History'') is an astrometric star catalogue published in 1801 by the French astronomer Jérôme Lalande and his staff at the Paris Observatory. This star catalog consists of the locations and ...

''. In 1847 edition of Lalande's catalogue by Francis Baily it was assigned number 25372, since it sometimes designated as ''Lalande 25372'' or ''LAL 25372''. High proper motion of this star and its large parallax were known at least from 1911, when Frank Schlesinger published a paper where he announced its parallax and mentioned its proper motion value of 2.3 arcsec. In 1919, German astronomer

Max Wolf Maximilian Franz Joseph Cornelius Wolf (21 June 1863 – 3 October 1932) was a German astronomer and a pioneer in the field of astrophotography. He was the chairman of astronomy at the University of Heidelberg and director of the Heidelberg-K� ...

included GJ 526 in his catalogue of high

proper motion Proper motion is the astrometric measure of the observed changes in the apparent places of stars or other celestial objects in the sky, as seen from the center of mass of the Solar System, compared to the abstract background of the more dista ...

stars, giving it the identifier 498.

Properties

GJ 526 is a flare star, which means it undergoes sporadic increases in brightness of up to 1–6 magnitudes. It is a

main sequence In astronomy, the main sequence is a continuous and distinctive band of stars that appears on plots of stellar color versus brightness. These color-magnitude plots are known as Hertzsprung–Russell diagrams after their co-developers, Ejnar Her ...

with a

stellar classification In astronomy, stellar classification is the classification of stars based on their stellar spectrum, spectral characteristics. Electromagnetic radiation from the star is analyzed by splitting it with a Prism (optics), prism or diffraction grati ...

of M1.5 V. GJ 526 is smaller than the Sun, with 28% of the mass and 58.2% of the radius. It shines with just 1.1% of the luminosity of the Sun, with its stellar atmosphere radiating at an

effective temperature The effective temperature of a body such as a star or planet is the temperature of a black body that would emit the same total amount of electromagnetic radiation. Effective temperature is often used as an estimate of a body's surface temperature ...

of 3,474 K. GJ 526 has been examined for an excess of radiation in the infrared. The presence of an infrared excess can be taken as an indication of a debris disk orbiting the star. However, no such excess was discovered around GJ 526.

References

Notes

{{Stars of Boötes Boötes 0526 M-type main-sequence stars 119850 Flare stars Durchmusterung objects 067155