Gar

Gar is a small and faint red dwarf star in the northern parts of Virgo, in the general direction of the brighter star Vindemiatrix or Epsilon Virginis. This is a relatively close neighbour to the Sun, at a distance of just 26.35 light years, but Gar has only a fraction of the Sun's luminosity and so, despite its proximity, it shines with a magnitude of just +11.39. This makes it far too faint to be seen with the naked eye. As is typical for red dwarfs, Gar is a long-lived star, but cool by stellar standards (its surface temperature is estimated at 3,340 K, a little over half that of the Sun).

Gar has no known stellar companions, but it does have a single known planet. This planet, Gliese 486 b or 'Su' is super Earth, a rocky body like Earth, but more than twice as massive and with a diameter some 1.3 times greater. The planet Su follows an exceptionally close orbit around its star (less than 2% of the distance from the Sun to Earth), and it completes this orbit in a period of just one day and eleven hours. Though Gar is a comparatively cool star, its planet Su orbits so closely that its surface is nonetheless heated to temperatures of 700 K (or more than four hundred degrees Celsius).

The name Gar for this red dwarf, and Su for its planet, were selected as part of the IAU's NameExoWorlds initiative. These names come from the Basque language, in which Gar means 'flame' and Su means 'fire' (an appropriate name indeed for the baking world that carries it).