Barnard's Star: a fast-moving measured point in the Gaia catalogue

Measured facts

Catalogue identity

Gaia DR3 4472832130942575872

Aliases

Barnard Star · GJ 699

Source id

4472832130942575872

Distance

1.828 pc · 5.96 ly

Measured catalogue

Gaia DR3 (ESA/Gaia/DPAC and the Gaia Archive)

What COSMOS shows

A nearby Gaia source cross-identified by SIMBAD as Barnard's Star. Its rendered depth is the reciprocal of high-S/N DR3 parallax and its position is propagated linearly from J2016.0.

Positions are propagated linearly from the Gaia J2016.0 reference epoch using measured proper motion and, where Gaia publishes it, radial velocity.

A missing radial velocity is never treated as a measured zero. This star has a published radial velocity, so all three components of its motion are used.

Measured astrometry

Every field below is copied from the shipped Gaia DR3 manifest for the Gaia DR3 high-S/N stellar catalogue inside 100 pc. The catalogue selects sources with parallax S/N of at least 10 and a non-null G magnitude, then stores measured position, colour, motion and the published radial velocity. Naive reciprocal of raw Gaia DR3 parallax for this positive, S/N >= 10 sample. No zero-point correction or Bayesian prior is applied.

Parallax

546.975940 masUncertainty 0.040116 mas; signal-to-noise 13634.7.

Derived distance

1.828234 pc · 5.963 lyNaive reciprocal of the raw positive parallax; no zero-point correction and no Bayesian prior.

Right ascension / declination (ICRS)

269.448503° · 4.739420°Reference epoch J2016.0.

G magnitude

8.1940Used only through the bounded COSMOS brightness transfer, which is not an absolute luminosity estimate.

BP−RP colour index

2.8337Rendered through a restrained display transfer, not converted to a temperature.

Proper motion (μ_α*, μ_δ)

-801.551 · 10362.394 mas/yrμ_α* includes the cos δ factor. Positions are propagated linearly from J2016.0.

Radial velocity

-110.468 km/sIncluded, so all three velocity components are measured.

RUWE

1.084850Gaia renormalised unit weight error, carried as provenance rather than used as a selection cut for this landmark.

Catalogue chunk

core-25pcPart of the 371,766-source measured volume inside 100 pc.

Provenance

Provider

ESA Gaia Archive

Release

Gaia DR3

Licence

Gaia public archive data; follow ESA/Gaia/DPAC acknowledgement and citation guidance for publication.

Attribution

ESA/Gaia/DPAC and the Gaia Archive

Catalogue checked

2026-09-05

Catalogue SHA-256

0069111d383d2d2014a73819b637cefee233ed468309115c267098fe6092706d

Alias cross-identification

https://simbad.u-strasbg.fr/simbad/sim-id?Ident=Barnard%27s+StarSIMBAD supplies only the visible common name for this source; the astrometry is Gaia.

Limitations COSMOS discloses

• Astronomic distance is a derived quantity from a truncated parallax, so it is not a direct measurement and it carries the stated parallax uncertainty.
• The rendered point size and colour come from bounded display transfers and must not be read as physical size, luminosity or temperature.
• Motion is propagated linearly from J2016.0. Over decades this approximation degrades, and COSMOS does not extrapolate it indefinitely.
• COSMOS names only a small set of nearby stars. It does not claim these are the nearest stars in existence, only that they are the measured landmarks the catalogue currently renders as destinations.