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by Sharlin 5449 days ago
A red dwarf from 1000 au would only look like a moderately bright star, won't it?

Indeed. The absolute magnitude of 55 Cancri B is 12.66, and the distance between the companions is 1065 AU [1]. Plugging these values to the magnitude equation yields a visual magnitude of about -3.78 [2], a little fainter than Venus at its minimum brightness [3].

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/55_Cancri [2] http://orbitsimulator.com/formulas/vmag9.html [3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apparent_magnitude#Table_of_not...