V538 Aurigae
star in the constellation Auriga
V538 Aurigae is a single star in the northern constellation of Auriga. With an apparent visual magnitude of about 6.2, this star requires good dark sky conditions to view with the naked eye. It is located at a distance of 40.0 light-years (12.3 pc) from Sun based on parallax. The star is drifting further away with a radial velocity of 0.9 km/s. It is a member of the Local Association, and is most likely a thin disk star.
Eric Gaidos et al. discovered that V538 Aurigae is a variable star based on observations by robotic telescopes at Fairborn Observatory from 1993 through 1999, and they announced their discovery in 2000. The star was given its variable star designation in 2006. This is a BY Draconis variable, which means it undergoes changes in luminosity because regions of pronounced surface magnetic activity are moved into and out of the line of sight from the Earth as the star rotates (once every 11 days). It has a spectral class of K1 V, indicating that it is a K-type main sequence star.
“V538 Aurigae” enters the record as star in the constellation Auriga. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what V538, Aurigae and star can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 12, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q2402851. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1993, 1999, 2000 and 2006.
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This entry incorporates text from “V538 Aurigae” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.