Stars
Beginning of paper
Magnitudes
The magnitude scale was invented by an ancient Greek astronomer named Hipparchus
in about 150 BC He ranked the he could see in terms of their brightness,
with 1 representing the brightest down to 6 representing the faintest. Modern
astronomy has extended this system to stars brighter th ....
Middle of paper
.... those which are visibly variable are marked with a "v".
What are apparent and absolute magnitudes? Apparent is how bright the appear to
us in the sky. The scale is somewhat arbitrary, as explained above, but a
magnitude difference of 5 has been set to exactly a factor of 100 in intensity.
Absolute magnitudes are how bright a star would appear from some standard
distance, arbitrarily set as 10 parsecs or about 32.6 light years. Stars can be
as bright as absolute magnitude -8 and as fa ....
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Word count: 817
Page count: 3 (approximately 250 words per page)
