title: Kappa Mensae
text: # Kappa Mensae
  
  Kappa Mensae, Latinized from κ Mensae, is a solitary star in the southern circumpolar constellation Mensa. Its distance of 296 light years based on its parallax shift gives it an apparent magnitude of 5.45, making it faintly visible to the naked eye. However, it is receding from the Sun with a heliocentric radial velocity of 9.5 km/s.
  
  Kappa Mensae has a stellar classification of B9 V, indicating that it is an ordinary B-type main-sequence star. At present it has 3.44 times the mass of the Sun and a diameter of 1.95 $R_☉.$ It radiates at 66 times the luminosity from its photosphere at an effective temperature of 10,965 K, giving it a bluish white hue. The star is very young, aged 115 million years, having completed only 33.7% of its main sequence lifetime. Kappa Mensae has a high rate of spin, rotating with a projected rotational velocity of 290 km/s.
  
  