Kappa Persei

Kappa Persei (Kappa Per, κ Persei, κ Per) is the Bayer designation for a star in the northern constellation of Perseus. It can be seen with the naked eye, having an apparent visual magnitude of 3.80. Based upon an annual parallax shift of 28.93 mas, it is located at a distance of 113 light years from the Sun. At that distance, the visual magnitude is diminished by an extinction factor of 0.06 due to interstellar dust.

With an estimated age of 4.58 billion years, this is an evolved G-type giant star with a stellar classification of G9.5 IIIb. It is a red clump giant, which means that it is generating energy at its core through the nuclear fusion of helium. The star has about 1.5 times the mass of the Sun and 9 times the Sun's radius. It radiates 40 times the solar luminosity from it outer atmosphere at an effective temperature of 4,857 K.

Eggleton and Tokovinin (2008) list Kappa Persei as a probably binary star system with an unknown companion. Likewise, Famaey and colleagues (2005) cataloged it as a spectroscopic binary. It has a visual companion: a magnitude 13.50 star at an angular separation of 44.10 arc seconds along a position angle of 319°, as of 2009. Kappa Persei has a relatively high proper motion totaling 0.230 arc seconds per year. There is a 76.3% chance that it is a member of the Hyades-Pleiades stream of stars that share a common motion through space.