This image centers on 55 Persei, the blue-white star in the center. The yellow-white star below 55 Persei is 56 Persei. Above 55 Persei is a pair of stars, V590 Persei and HIP 20573. There is also a galaxy faintly visible below 54 Persei, it is known as UGC 3028 and to its right is the star HD 27730. At the bottom of this page is an annotated image highlighting the locations of these objects.
55 Persei is a main sequence type star and the Gaia early release data shows it's parallax as being 6.8599 millicarcseconds. This means the star is about 143.8 parsec, or 469 light years from Earth.
This star visible under moderately dark skies. It can be easily seen with any telescope or binoculars.
55 Persei is not as well studied as many other similarly bright stars are. The earliest reference to this star in SIMBAD is the 1959 publication of a paper titled "A high dispersion photoelectric spectrophotometer." (Rogerson J.B., Spitzer L.Jr., and Bahng J.D).
Optimized Travel Trajectories | |
Star Name | HIP 20591 |
Deceleration (km/s) | 22851 |
Travel Time (years) | 1764.6 |
Distance (light years) | 134.4 |
Luminosity (solar units) | 7.30499 |
Optimized trajectory to 55 Per using lightweight high-velocity photon sails. |
56 Per is a multiple star system with three and possibly four components. The main component of 56 Per visible in this photo, and it is a binary star made up of a large F-type main sequence star and a much smaller dwarf.
The primary star seen here is spectral type F4V and its visual magnitude is 5.792. The star's parallax is 24.62 milliarcseconds, so it its distance from Earth is is 40.6 parsec, or 132.5 light years.
This star was included in the 2017 Astronomical Journal publication titled "Optimized trajectories to the nearest stars using lightweight high-velocity photon sails" (Heller R., Hippke M. and Kervella P.).
According to the study, it would take about 1764.6 years to travel to 56 Persei using the light-sail technology described in the paper. The full study contains a list of over 22,000 optimized travel trajectories to various stars within an approximate 300 light-year radius around Earth. The entry for 56 Persei is shown in Figure 1. Note that 56 Persei is listed in this study under its alternate designation of HIP 20591.
V590 Persei, the larger of the two stars, is an eclipsing binary. This means it is actually two stars, but they are so close together that this image shows them as a single point of light. They are eclipsing as well, which means that during their respective orbits, one of the stars will be periodically hidden behind the other as seen from Earth.
The spectral type of V590 Per star is B8V and it is a cool blue-white main sequence star. The parallax is 4.7823 mas, which means it is 209.1 parsec, or 682 light years from Earth.
The smaller star to the upper left is HIP 20573, an F2IV type of main sequence star also known as a yellow-white subgiant. HIP 20573 has a parallax of 4.4765 mas, so it is 223.389 parsecs, or 728.6 light-years from Earth.
These two stars are an optical double which means they are a chance alignment along our line of sight and they do not actually orbit each other. Their respective distances show they are about 46 light-years apart, the closer of the two being V590 Persei.