Abstract
Parallaxes of Faint Stars.—Study of pairs of photographs taken at intervals of several years have revealed many examples of very faint stars with fairly rapid proper motions. Mount Wilson Contributions, No. 435, contains a paper by A. Van Maanen on an investigation of the parallaxes of some of these stars from photographs taken with the 100-inch and 60-inch reflectors. The largest parallax on the list is that of B.D.43°4305, for which the value 0.209″was found. That star had, however, already been measured elsewhere. Another large parallax is that of Ross 41, mag. 13.4, parallax 0.110″. Altogether there are 15 stars on the published list that have absolute magnitude fainter than 10.0. The faintest is a star lately found by Hubble to have a proper motion of more than 1″; its absolute magnitude is 14.0. The fact that such a large number of extreme dwarfs are found comparatively near the sun shows that this type of star must really be very common in space, but they are too faint for observation unless their distance is small.
Article PDF
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Astronomical Topics. Nature 129, 658 (1932). https://doi.org/10.1038/129658a0
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/129658a0