Nu Cassiopeiae
Nu Cassiopeiae is a blue-white star, far hotter than the Sun, in the constellation Cassiopeia. It is a giant: a star that has used up the hydrogen in its core and swollen up.
How far
410 light years
The light you see from Nu Cassiopeiae tonight set off about 410 years ago. Everything we know about it is that much out of date.
At this distance the figure could be out by a tenth or so.
How bright
150 Suns
It gives out 150 times as much visible light as the Sun. It can be seen by eye away from bright lights.
Astronomers put its brightness in our sky at magnitude 4.90. Smaller numbers are brighter, and the faintest stars the eye can see are about 6.
How hot
Hotter than 11,000 K
That is the temperature of its surface, worked out from its colour, so it is a guide and not a measurement. For stars as blue as this one, colour is a poor thermometer: most of their light is ultraviolet, which the eye and this sum do not see, and the true figure can be far higher. 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.
Nu CassiopeiaeThe 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)
- Nu Cassiopeiae
- Hipparcos catalogue
- HIP 3801
- Henry Draper catalogue
- HD 4636
- Spectral type
- B9III
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 worked out here from the colour with the formula of Ballesteros (2012), and the words are written for this site.
To read more: Colour and brightness, How stars live and die, Measuring distance.