Gliese 676 is a 10th magnitude

Apparent magnitude

The apparent magnitude of a celestial body is a measure of its brightness as seen by an observer on Earth, adjusted to the value it would have in the absence of the atmosphere...

 binary star

Binary star

A binary star is a star system consisting of two stars orbiting around their common center of mass. The brighter star is called the primary and the other is its companion star, comes, or secondary...

, both are M-type main sequence

Main sequence

The main sequence is a continuous and distinctive band of stars that appears on plots of stellar color versus brightness. These color-magnitude plots are known as Hertzsprung–Russell diagrams after their co-developers, Ejnar Hertzsprung and Henry Norris Russell...

 star

Star

A star is a massive, luminous sphere of plasma held together by gravity. At the end of its lifetime, a star can also contain a proportion of degenerate matter. The nearest star to Earth is the Sun, which is the source of most of the energy on Earth...

s located approximately 53 light years away in the constellation

Constellation

In modern astronomy, a constellation is an internationally defined area of the celestial sphere. These areas are grouped around asterisms, patterns formed by prominent stars within apparent proximity to one another on Earth's night sky....

 Ara

Ara (constellation)

Ara is a southern constellation situated between Scorpius and Triangulum Australe. Its name is Latin for "altar". Ara was one of the 48 Greek constellations described by the 2nd century astronomer Ptolemy, and it remains one of the 88 modern constellations defined by the International Astronomical...

. Both stars are smaller, cooler, dimmer, and less massive than our Sun. In 2009, a gas giant

Gas giant

A gas giant is a large planet that is not primarily composed of rock or other solid matter. There are four gas giants in the Solar System: Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune...

 planet was found in orbit around the star Gliese 676 A.

Planetary system

Gliese 676 Ab is an extrasolar planet

Extrasolar planet

An extrasolar planet, or exoplanet, is a planet outside the Solar System. A total of such planets have been identified as of . It is now known that a substantial fraction of stars have planets, including perhaps half of all Sun-like stars...

 which orbits Gliese 676 A. This planet has at least four times the mass of Jupiter

Jupiter

Jupiter is the fifth planet from the Sun and the largest planet within the Solar System. It is a gas giant with mass one-thousandth that of the Sun but is two and a half times the mass of all the other planets in our Solar System combined. Jupiter is classified as a gas giant along with Saturn,...

 and takes approximately 1000 days to orbit the star at a semimajor axis of approximately 1.64 AU

Astronomical unit

An astronomical unit is a unit of length equal to about or approximately the mean Earth–Sun distance....

. The planet's existence was announced in October 2009 but no discovery paper has yet been made available.