An extensive catalogue of stars and brown dwarfs, concentrating specifically on those that lie relatively close to the Solar System. The catalogue originated in 1957 with the astronomer Wilhelm Gliese, whose first Catalogue of Nearby Stars listed a total of 915 stars within twenty parsecs (65.2 light years) of the Sun, ordered according to their right ascension.
Subsequent editions extended the original list to include objects within twenty-two parsecs (71.8 light years), and ultimately twenty-fve parsecs (81.5 light years). For much of this additional cataloguing work, Gliese collaborated with Hartmut Jahreiß, and so the later extended versions are known more fully as Gliese-Jahreiß (or 'GJ') catalogues.
The first star in the Gliese-Jahreß catalogue, Gliese 1, is a ninth-magnitudereddwarf in the constellation of Sculptor. It lies just 14.17 light years from the Sun and, in common with most nearby stars, has a high proper motion against its background, shown here by the blue and orange markers indicating its path. Imagery provided by Aladin sky atlas
The most recent edition of the catalogue is the Fifth Catalogue of Nearby Stars (or 'CNS5'), which was released in 2022. This latest catalogue lists objects up to Gliese 13461 (though for technical reasons the numbering is not contiguous). It contains a total of 5,931
nearby objects of various kinds. The vast majority of these are main-sequence stars (including many reddwarfs), but the catalogue also includes 20 redgiants, 264 white dwarfs and 701 brown dwarfs.
In formal use, numbers in the Gliese-Jahreiß catalogue are typically abbreviated to 'GJ' (so GJ 551, for example, refers to the Sun's closest stellar neighbour, Proxima Centauri). The fuller 'Gliese' is more generally familiar than either 'GJ' or 'Gliese-Jahreiß' and (though strictly it would apply only to those stars in the first edition of the catalogue) we tend to prefer it on this site. As a German name, incidentally, the final 'e' of the name Gliese should be pronounced, so the entire name is rendered as something like 'glee-zeh'.
