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Stars · the fastest

Barnard's Star: the fastest-moving star in the sky

Barnard's Star, a small orange-red dwarf, with the Milky Way's dust lane behind it

Barnard's Star is the nearest single star to the Sun, 6 light-years away, and the star that moves fastest across our sky: it covers the width of the full Moon every 180 years. It is a faint red dwarf in the constellation Ophiuchus, and it has a planet.

Fly to Barnard's StarSee the Milky Way
Distance
5.96 light-years
Kind
Red dwarf, spectral type M4
Size
0.2 times the Sun's width
Surface temperature
About 3,130 K
Motion on the sky
10.4 arcseconds a year: the full Moon's width in about 180 years
Age
Probably about 10 billion years, more than twice the Sun's
Planet
Barnard's Star b, a 3-day orbit, about a third of the Earth's mass

Barnard's runaway

Almost all stars seem fixed to us, but over years the nearest ones drift against the background, and Barnard's Star drifts fastest of all, discovered in 1916 by the American astronomer Edward Barnard. It is not racing across space; it is simply near. It is also coming towards us, at about 110 km/s, and in about 12,000 years it will pass us at about 3.8 light-years, and be for a while the nearest star of all.

A planet, found after sixty years

In the 1960s an astronomer claimed to see planets pulling Barnard's Star about, and the claim was proved false. A cold planet reported in 2018 did not survive further observation either. In 2024 a team using the ESPRESSO instrument found a different one, Barnard's Star b: about a third of the mass of the Earth, closer to its star than Mercury is to the Sun, orbiting every 3.15 days. It is far too hot for liquid water. In 2025 astronomers reported three more small candidates.

In Exo-View

The key below flies from the Sun to Barnard's Star, which lies in the direction of the Milky Way's centre. The planet is drawn in its orbit as an illustration made from its figures: no one has a picture of it, and the plate says so.

Fly to Barnard's StarSee the Milky Way

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