Van Maanen's Star
Van Maanen's Star is a white dwarf, in the constellation Pisces. It is the dead core of a star that was once like the Sun: about the size of the Earth, no longer making energy, and slowly cooling.
How far
14 light years
The light you see from Van Maanen's Star tonight set off about 14 years ago. Everything we know about it is that much out of date.
How bright
0.00 of a Sun
It gives out one 5,600th of the Sun's visible light. It is too faint to see without a telescope.
Astronomers put its brightness in our sky at magnitude 12.37. Smaller numbers are brighter, and the faintest stars the eye can see are about 6.
How hot
About 6,200 K
That is the temperature of its surface, worked out from its colour, so it is a guide and not a measurement. It could be out by a few hundred degrees. The Sun's is 5,772 K. Hotter stars are bluer and cooler stars are redder, the same way a poker in a fire goes from red to white.
Van Maanen's StarThe Sun
Its names
- Its own name
- Van Maanen's Star
- Hipparcos catalogue
- HIP 3829
- Spectral type
- DG
Where this comes from
Distance, brightness, colour and spectral type are from the HYG star database, version 4.4, by David Nash, shared under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 licence. Its distances are those measured by the Hipparcos satellite. The temperature is worked out here from the colour with the formula of Ballesteros (2012), and the words are written for this site.
To read more: Colour and brightness, How stars live and die, Measuring distance.