Wolf 359: a faint, strongly reddened measured point

Measured facts

Catalogue identity

Gaia DR3 3864972938605115520

Aliases

CN Leonis · GJ 406

Source id

3864972938605115520

Distance

2.409 pc · 7.86 ly

Measured catalogue

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

What COSMOS shows

A nearby Gaia source cross-identified by SIMBAD as Wolf 359, placed and propagated from measured DR3 direction, parallax, and proper motion.

Its BP−RP colour index is large, which the restrained COSMOS colour transfer renders as a warm tone rather than a saturated one. The transfer is a display mapping, not a temperature measurement.

Gaia does not publish a radial velocity for this source, so the radial component of its motion remains unknown. COSMOS records that as an unknown rather than a zero.

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

415.179416 masUncertainty 0.068371 mas; signal-to-noise 6072.5.

Derived distance

2.408597 pc · 7.856 lyNaive reciprocal of the raw positive parallax; no zero-point correction and no Bayesian prior.

Right ascension / declination (ICRS)

164.103190° · 7.002727°Reference epoch J2016.0.

G magnitude

11.0384Used only through the bounded COSMOS brightness transfer, which is not an absolute luminosity estimate.

BP−RP colour index

4.1848Rendered through a restrained display transfer, not converted to a temperature.

Proper motion (μ_α*, μ_δ)

-3866.338 · -2699.215 mas/yrμ_α* includes the cos δ factor. Positions are propagated linearly from J2016.0.

Radial velocity

Not publishedThe radial component therefore remains unknown and contributes zero only to this short-epoch display approximation.

RUWE

0.835335Gaia 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=Wolf+359SIMBAD 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.