Kappa Serpentis
star in the constellation Serpens
Kappa Serpentis, Latinised from κ Serpentis, is a single, red-hued star in the constellation Serpens, in its head (Serpens Caput). It has the proper name Gudja and the Flamsteed designation 35 Serpentis. This star is visible to the naked eye with an apparent visual magnitude of +4.09. It is located approximately 383 light years from the Sun, based on parallax, and is drifting closer with a radial velocity of −38 km/s.
This object is an aging red giant star with a stellar classification of M0.5III. After exhausting the supply of hydrogen at its core, the star cooled and expanded off the main sequence, and now has around 71 times the Sun's radius. It is radiating nearly 1,000 times the luminosity of the Sun from its photosphere at an effective temperature of 3,863 K. This is a suspected variable star. Although simple grading based on its colour and luminosity mark this star as possibly being on the asymptotic giant branch, a closer study places it as being towards the most luminous part of the red giant branch, before starting core helium fusion.
Nomenclature
κ Serpentis (Latinised to Kappa Serpentis) is the star's Bayer designation.
The star bore the traditional name Gudja (or Judja) in the culture of the Wardaman people of the Northern Territory of Australia, meaning 'water goanna'. In 2016, the IAU organized a Working Group on Star Names (WGSN) to catalog and standardize proper names for stars.
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This entry incorporates text from “Kappa Serpentis” 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.