The Kinematics and Ages of Stars in Gliese’s Catalogue

This contribution gives some results on the kinematics and ages of stars near the Sun. These results are mainly based on the catalogue of nearby stars compiled by Gliese (1957, 1969 and minor recent modifications). Table I shows the number of objects under consideration. While the old catalogue (1957) contained only stars with distances r up to 20 pc, the new edition (1969) includes many stars with slightly larger distances. In Table I, a ‘system’ is either a single star or a binary or a multiple system. The number of systems with known space velocities nearer than 20 pc has increased by about 30% from 1957 to 1969. The first edition of Gliese’s catalogue (1957) has been analyzed in detail by Gliese (1956) and von Hoerner (1960).