Astronomy and Space

81 Ceti

81 Ceti is a star located approximately 343 light-years away from the Sun in the equatorial constellation of Cetus. 81 Ceti is the Flamsteed designation for this object. It is visible to the naked eye as a dim, yellow-hued point of light with an apparent visual magnitude of 5.65. The star is drifting further away from the Earth with a heliocentric radial velocity of +9 km/s. This is an aging K-type giant star with a stellar classification of K0III, having exhausted the supply of hydrogen at its core and expanded to 11 times the Sun's radius. It is a red clump giant, which indicates it is on the horizontal branch and is generating energy from core helium fusion. The star is now 2.5 billion years old with 1.6 times the mass of the Sun. It is radiating 60 times the luminosity of the Sun from its enlarged photosphere at an effective temperature of 4,825 K.

Also on this shelf

See also

• ▸Eugene Parker
• ▸Brady Peak
• ▸2013 in spaceflight

Uncatalogued shelf

Text from Wikipedia; plate via Wikimedia Commons. Text CC BY-SA 4.0; plate freely licensed (see Commons). Source record. Images and catalogue data are reproduced from open-access collections.