Abstract
A. VAN MAANEN has prepared a paper with this title (Astro. Soc. Pacific, Leaf. 176; 1943) which deals with the developments in the discoveries of stellar motions, from the time of Tobias Mayer who determined the motions of several stars in 1760, by comparing his own observations with those of Römer made fifty years earlier. A useful table gives the proper motions of thirty stars with the largest proper motions, in all cases exceeding 3" annually. Large proper motion suggests relative proximity to the earth, and for this reason it is not surprising that nineteen of the thirty stars are less than 16·3 light-years distant from the sun, and seven are nearer than 32·6 light-years. A very interesting feature in the table is the luminosity of each star, that of the sun being the unit. Only one star- Centauri A—is brighter than the sun, its luminosity being 1·14. The table also shows that stars with the faintest luminosities belong to the most advanced spectral types and so have the lowest temperatures, with the exception of the white dwarfs. The luminosities of the latter are very low, that of Wolf 489 being only 0·00008.
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Stars with Large Proper Motions. Nature 153, 585 (1944). https://doi.org/10.1038/153585a0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/153585a0