hip-17886

Its story

42 Persei is a short-period spectroscopic binary: the primary, a white A3V star twice the Sun's mass and nearly sixty times its luminosity, sweeps around an invisible red dwarf companion in just 1.77 days, distorted by the encounter. That distortion drives a brightness drift between magnitudes 5.05 and 5.18. At 269 light-years, it is a silent waltzer mid-stride across Perseus.