Struve 2398 (Gliese 725) is a
binary star
A binary star is a system of two stars that are gravitationally bound to and in orbit around each other. Binary stars in the night sky that are seen as a single object to the naked eye are often resolved using a telescope as separate stars, in ...
system in the northern constellation of
Draco
Draco is the Latin word for serpent or dragon.
Draco or Drako may also refer to:
People
* Draco (lawgiver) (from Greek: Δράκων; 7th century BC), the first lawgiver of ancient Athens, Greece, from whom the term ''draconian'' is derived
* ...
. Struve 2398 is star number 2398 in the
Struve Double Star Catalog of Baltic-German astronomer
Friedrich Georg Wilhelm von Struve
Friedrich Georg Wilhelm von Struve (russian: link=no, Василий Яковлевич Струве, trans. ''Vasily Yakovlevich Struve''; 15 April 1793 – ) was a Baltic German astronomer and geodesist from the famous Struve family. He is be ...
. The astronomer's surname, and hence the star identifier, is sometimes indicated by a Greek sigma, Σ; hence, this system can be listed with the identifier Σ 2398. Although the components are too faint to be viewed with the naked eye, this star system is among the
closest to the Sun.
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 object ...
measurements by the
Gaia
In Greek mythology, Gaia (; from Ancient Greek , a poetical form of , 'land' or 'earth'),, , . also spelled Gaea , is the personification of the Earth and one of the Greek primordial deities. Gaia is the ancestral mother—sometimes parthe ...
spacecraft give them an estimated distance of away.
Both stars are small
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 (TV channel), Dave since 2009, gaining a ...
s, with each having around a third the Sun's mass and radius. They each display the type of
variability Variability is how spread out or closely clustered a set of data is.
Variability may refer to:
Biology
*Genetic variability, a measure of the tendency of individual genotypes in a population to vary from one another
*Heart rate variability, a phy ...
common to
flare star
A flare star is a variable star that can undergo unpredictable dramatic increases in brightness for a few minutes. It is believed that the flares on flare stars are analogous to solar flares in that they are due to the magnetic energy stored in th ...
s,
[ and their active surfaces are sources of ]X-ray emission
Astrophysical X-ray sources are astronomical objects with physical properties which result in the emission of X-rays.
Several types of astrophysical objects emit X-rays. They include galaxy clusters, black holes in active galactic nuclei (AGN), ...
.[ They are orbiting with period of about 295 years, at a separation of about 56 ]astronomical units
The astronomical unit (symbol: au, or or AU) is a unit of length, roughly the distance from Earth to the Sun and approximately equal to or 8.3 light-minutes. The actual distance from Earth to the Sun varies by about 3% as Earth orbi ...
with an orbital eccentricity
In astrodynamics, the orbital eccentricity of an astronomical object is a dimensionless parameter that determines the amount by which its orbit around another body deviates from a perfect circle. A value of 0 is a circular orbit, values b ...
(ovalness) of 0.70.[
The pair has a relatively 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 ...
of 2.2 arc seconds per year. The system is on an orbit through the Milky Way
The Milky Way is the galaxy that includes our Solar System, with the name describing the galaxy's appearance from Earth: a hazy band of light seen in the night sky formed from stars that cannot be individually distinguished by the naked ey ...
that has an eccentricity of 0.05, carrying them as close as 8 kpc and as far as 9 kpc from the Galactic Center
The Galactic Center or Galactic Centre is the rotational center, the barycenter, of the Milky Way galaxy. Its central massive object is a supermassive black hole of about 4 million solar masses, which is called Sagittarius A*, a compact ...
. The plane of their galactic orbit carries them as far as 463−489 pc away from the galactic plane
The galactic plane is the plane on which the majority of a disk-shaped galaxy's mass lies. The directions perpendicular to the galactic plane point to the galactic poles. In actual usage, the terms ''galactic plane'' and ''galactic poles'' usual ...
.[
]
Planetary system
In 2016, a planet candidate on a 2.7-day orbit was proposed around Struve 2398 B, although the signal was found to be comparable with an instrumental noise floor. In 2019, two candidate planets were detected in orbit around component B using the radial velocity method
Doppler spectroscopy (also known as the radial-velocity method, or colloquially, the wobble method) is an indirect method for finding extrasolar planets and brown dwarfs from radial-velocity measurements via observation of Doppler shifts in ...
, without detection of the previous candidate.[
]
See also
* List of nearest stars
This list covers all known stars, brown dwarfs, and sub-brown dwarfs within of the Sun. So far, 131 such objects have been found, of which only 22 are bright enough to be visible without a telescope. The visible light needs to reach or exc ...
References
External links
SolStation entry
* http://www.daviddarling.info/encyclopedia/S/Struve2398.html
* http://www.richweb.f9.co.uk/astro/nearby_stars.htm
* http://jumk.de/astronomie/near-stars/struve-2398.shtml
{{DEFAULTSORT:Struve 2398
173739 40
091768 72
0725
BD+59 1915
Draco (constellation)
Local Bubble
M-type main-sequence stars
Binary stars
Flare stars
Hypothetical planetary systems