It is a yellow-hued class G8 subdwarf catalogued by British astronomer Stephen Groombridge with the Groombridge Transit Circle between 1806 and the 1830s and published posthumously in his star catalog, Catalogue of Circumpolar Stars (1838).

[9] Once suspected of being a binary star with a period of 175 days, current consensus is that it is single.

Previous suspected observations of a stellar companion were probably "superflares"—analogous to the Sun's solar flares, but hundreds to millions of times more energetic.

When discovered, it had the highest proper motion of any star known, replacing 61 Cygni in that department.

It is considerably farther away than either of those stars, however, which means its transverse velocity is greater.