HD 140283's light is somewhat blueshifted as it is moving toward rather than away from the Earth and it has been known to astronomers for over a century as a high-velocity star based on its proper motion.

An early spectroscopic analysis by Joseph W. Chamberlain and Lawrence Aller revealed it to have a substantially lower metal content than the Sun.

[11] Because HD 140283 is neither on the main sequence nor a red giant, its early position in the Hertzsprung–Russell diagram has been interpreted with its data and theoretical models of stellar evolution based on quantum mechanics and the observations of processes in millions of stars to infer its apparent old age.

A study published in 2013[12] used the Fine Guidance Sensors of NASA's Hubble Space Telescope to measure a precise parallax (and therefore distance and luminosity) for the star.

If so, the apparent visual data of the oldest of these enables us to put an upper limit on the date of the reionization (first star formation) phase of the Universe independently of theories and evidence of the first few million years after the Big Bang.

[18] This hypothesis of such stars' birth and our best models of the early universe indicate that the time it took for the gases to cool was likely only a few tens of millions of years.

Some of the latter may be visible in gravitational lensing in looking at deepest images such as the Hubble Ultra-Deep Field (i.e., their brief existence before their turning into supernovae).