2MASS J15404341−5101357 (abbreviated 2M1540) is a red dwarf of spectral type M7, located in Norma at 17.374 light-years (5.326 parsecs) from Earth.
Discovery Its discovery was announced in 2014 by Kirkpatrick et al. and independently by Pérez Garrido et al.
Kirkpatrick and colleagues found a few thousand new high proper motion objects under the AllWISE program of study of images, taken by Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE). 2M1540 was one of these high proper motion objects. They named it WISEA J154045.67-510139.3 and assigned it spectral type M6.
Pérez Garrido and colleagues were looking for high proper motion sources in the 2MASS–WISE cross-match. They named it 2MASS J154043.42-510135.7 (2M1540 for short) and classified it as an M7.0±0.5 dwarf.
Since the trigonometric distance of 2M1540 agreed with its spectrophotometric distances, computed for a single object, it was concluded that it is not an equal-mass binary.
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