HD 188015 is a yellow-hued star with an exoplanetary companion in the northern constellation of Vulpecula. It has an apparent visual magnitude of 8.24,[2] making it an 8th magnitude star, and thus is too faint to be readily visible to the naked eye. The distance to this star can be estimated through parallax measurements, which yield a separation of 165.6 light years from the Sun.[1]
A Jovian planetary companion to this star was announced in 2005, based on radial velocity measurements indicating a periodic perturbation. It is orbiting the host star at a distance of 1.2 AU with a period of 1.26 years and an eccentricity (ovalness) of 0.14. The inclination of the orbital plane remains unknown, so only a lower bound on the planet's mass can be determined. It has a minimum mass equal to 1.5 times the mass of Jupiter.[8] The orbital path of this object intersects the habitable zone of the star, which is likely to eject any Earth-like planet from that region.[10] Nevertheless, habitable moons are still possible in this system.
^ abHeard, John Frederick (1956). "The radial velocities, spectral classes and photographic magnitudes of 1041 late-type stars". Publications of the David Dunlap Observatory. 2 (4). University of Toronto, Toronto, Canada: University of Toronto Press: 107–143. Bibcode:1956PDDO....2..107H.