46 Ceti

46 Ceti is a single star in the equatorial constellation of Cetus. It is visible to the naked eye with an apparent visual magnitude of 4.9. The distance to this star, as determined from an annual parallax shift of $1.231$, is about 273 light years. It is moving closer to the Earth with a heliocentric radial velocity of −23 km/s, and is expected to come as close as 56.56 pc in 2.2 million years.

At the age of about four billion years, this is an evolved K-type giant star with a stellar classification of K2+ III–IIIb CN0.5. The suffix notation CN0.5 indicates a mild overabundance of cyanogen in the stellar atmosphere. It has 1.38 times the mass of the Sun and has expanded to 19 times the Sun's radius. The star is radiating 132 times the Sun's luminosity from its enlarged photosphere at an effective temperature of 4,316 K. The projected rotational velocity is too small to be measured.