Kappa Canis Majoris

Kappa Canis Majoris is a blue-white star, far hotter than the Sun, in the constellation Canis Major. It is a subgiant: a star just beginning to leave the long, steady part of its life.

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A drawing in the star's own colour, worked out from its measured colour index. It is not a photograph.

How far

660 light years

The light you see from Kappa Canis Majoris tonight set off about 660 years ago. Everything we know about it is that much out of date.

Distances this great are hard to measure, and this one could be out by a fifth or more.

How bright

1,400 Suns

It gives out 1,400 times as much visible light as the Sun. It is easy to see by eye on a clear night.

Astronomers put its brightness in our sky at magnitude 3.50. Smaller numbers are brighter, and the faintest stars the eye can see are about 6.

How hot

About 25,000 K

That is the temperature of its surface, worked out from its spectral type, B1.5IVne, with a standard table of how hot stars of each type are. It is a guide and not a measurement, and could be out by a tenth or so. For stars as hot as this, colour is a poor thermometer, because most of their light is ultraviolet, so the type is the better guide. The Sun's is 5,772 K. Hotter stars are bluer and cooler stars are redder, the same way a poker in a fire goes from red to white.

Kappa Canis MajorisThe Sun

In your sky now

Working it out…

Its names

It has no name of its own. Its name by constellation is a Greek letter and the constellation it is in, a way of naming begun by Johann Bayer in 1603.

By constellation (Bayer): Kappa Canis Majoris
Hipparcos catalogue: HIP 32759
Henry Draper catalogue: HD 50013
Spectral type: B1.5IVne

Where this comes from

Distance, brightness, colour and spectral type are from the HYG star database, version 4.4, by David Nash, shared under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 licence. Its distances are those measured by the Hipparcos satellite. The temperature is read from the spectral type with the table of Pecaut and Mamajek (2013), and the words are written for this site.