Ross 248 lies about 10.3 light-years away, in the northwestern part of Andromeda, near κ and ι And. It is the eighth closest star system, and the closest in the constellation Andromeda. At magnitude +12.29, it is far too faint to be seen by the naked eye. Ross 248 was discovered in 1925 by Frank Elmore Ross, who first reported on this star in his "Second List of New Proper-Motion Stars". Its nearest stellar neighbor is the BD +43 44 AB system (GX and GQ Andromedae), a mere 1.54 light years away.
Ross 248 is a cool, dim, main-sequence red dwarf of spectral class M5 Ve. It contains almost 25% of the Sun's mass, 7% of its diameter, but only 1/9,000th of its luminosity. Classified as a flare star, Ross 248 also has the variable-star designation HH Andromedae. Investigators have reported finding possible periods of variability at 4.2 years, 120 or 121 days, and five other periods between 60 and 291 days. These may be caused by an unresolved companion.
Ross 248 may have an unconfirmed sub-stellar companion with an orbital period of eight years. But in the late 1980s, a search using Doppler shift measurements for gravitational perturbations by companions as small as 20 times Jupiter's mass, located within 10 AU of Ross 248, was negative. Moreover, a recent search for faint companions using the Hubble Space Telescope found no evidence for any Jupiter- or brown-dwarf-sized objects. Any Earth-like planets must be located very close to Ross 248 (about 0.01 AU, with an orbital period of 1.4 days) to be warm enough for liquid water.
The Voyager 2 spacecraft is traveling on a path headed roughly in the direction of Ross 248. The spacecraft will make its closest approach to the star in approximately 40,000 years, at a distance of 1.7 light years.