11 Comae Berenices

11 Comae Berenices is a fifth-magnitude yellow-orange star in the southward regions of Coma Berenices. It lies against the backdrop of the northern Virgo Cluster of galaxies, with the prominent lenticular galaxy M85 lying just over a degree from the star to the northeast. Estimates of its precise distance vary, but it is known to be more than three hundred light years from the Sun (the most recent parallax data suggests a distance of some 321 light years).

Thought to be 1.5 billion years old (approximately a third of the Sun's age), this massive star is already in the later phases of its lifecycle, and has expanded to become a giant. It shines with a luminosity more than one hundred times greater than that of the Sun, and is some sixteen times the Sun's diameter.

11 Comae Berenices is known to have a companion object in orbit. This object, designated 11 Comae Berenices b, is a body with nearly twenty times the mass of Jupiter, orbiting the star at a distance of 1.3 AU (that is, 1.3 times farther from its star than Earth is from the Sun). Based on its considerable mass, this orbiting body appears to belong to the class known as brown dwarfs.