An Etymological Dictionary of Astronomy and Astrophysics

A → red dwarf star of → spectral type M4. Other designations: Proxima Virginis, FY Virginis, GJ 447, HIP 57548, and LHS 315. With a distance of just 3.4 → parsecs, it is one of the brightest representatives of this subclass (V = 11.15, J = 6.51, H =5.95, K = 5.65 mag). It is the 13th closest (sub-)stellar system to the Sun, including → brown dwarfs. Ross 128 is moving toward us and will actually become our closest neighbor in just 71,000 years from now. Ross 128 has an → effective temperature,

T_eff = 3192, a mass of 0.168 Msun (→ solar mass), a → luminosity of 0.00362 Lsun (→ solar luminosity), a radius of 0.017 Rsun (→ solar radius), and a → metallicity [Fe/H] of -0.02.

An Earth-sized → exoplanet, → R 128 b, orbits Ross 128 (Bonfils et al., 2017, arXiv:1711.06177).

See also: Star number 128 in the → Ross Catalogue.