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45 Cancri

star in the constellation Cancer

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General referenceInterpretive dossier study · Crown Archives visual atlas
Record originEnglish Wikipedia
Text licenseCC BY-SA 4.0
Source revisionSep 14, 2026
Entity authorityQ2403477
Source-derived summary

45 Cancri is a binary star system in the zodiac constellation of Cancer, located 680 light-years away from the Sun. It has the Bayer designation A1 Cancri; 45 Cancri is the Flamsteed designation. It is visible to the naked eye as a faint, white-hued star at an apparent visual magnitude of 5.62. The pair form a double-lined spectroscopic binary with an orbital period of 2.76 years and an eccentricity of 0.46. They are drifting closer to the Earth with a heliocentric radial velocity of −6 km/s.

The primary, designated component A, is an aging giant star with a stellar classification of G8 III, but has most likely not yet made multiple ascents up the red giant branch. It has 3.11 times the mass of the Sun and has expanded to 14 times the Sun's radius. The star is radiating 210 times the luminosity of the Sun from its enlarged photosphere at an effective temperature of 5,058 K. The less evolved secondary, component B is likewise a giant star, having a class of A3 III. It has three times the mass of the Sun and shines with 191 times the Sun's luminosity.

Editorial summary

“45 Cancri” enters the record as star in the constellation Cancer. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Cancri, star and constellation can confirm, complicate or overturn.

Editorial reviewA practical starting point whose main value is the path it opens into stronger specialist and primary sources. The current 191-word lead offers orientation but no explicit four-digit date, so chronology should not be assumed. The selected authority fields contribute no independent date. Its strongest next move is a source search built around Cancri, star and constellation.
Editorial analysis

Why this record matters

“45 Cancri” is worth following because a concise public description often conceals a longer documentary argument. Here, Cancri, star and constellation provides the most credible route into that argument.

Evidence profile

The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 14, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q2403477. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference.

Critical limits

A concise general-reference account can conceal disagreements about scope, terminology or the weight assigned to individual sources. The lead is largely declarative, so disagreement and counter-evidence require a deliberate search beyond the opening account. Authority statements aid reconciliation but still require their own references, qualifiers and ranks to be checked.

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Source & attribution

This entry incorporates text from 45 Cancri” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.