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The scale used to indicate magnitude originates in the Hellenistic practice of dividing stars visible to the naked eye into six magnitudes. The brightest stars in the night sky were said to be of first magnitude (m = 1), whereas the faintest were of sixth magnitude (m = 6), which is the limit of human visual perception (without the aid of a ...
Stars that have magnitudes between 1.5 and 2.5 are called second-magnitude; there are some 20 stars brighter than 1.5, which are first-magnitude stars (see the list of brightest stars). For example, Sirius is magnitude −1.46, Arcturus is −0.04, Aldebaran is 0.85, Spica is 1.04, and Procyon is 0.34.
An object's absolute magnitude is defined to be equal to the apparent magnitude that the object would have if it were viewed from a distance of exactly 10 parsecs (32.6 light-years), without extinction (or dimming) of its light due to absorption by interstellar matter and cosmic dust. By hypothetically placing all objects at a standard ...
In between the two distributions is an underpopulated space known as the green valley which includes a number of red spirals. Like the comparable Hertzsprung–Russell diagram for stars, galaxy properties are not necessarily completely determined by their location on the color–magnitude diagram. The diagram also shows considerable evolution ...
In astronomy, the color index is a simple numerical expression that determines the color of an object, which in the case of a star gives its temperature. The lower the color index, the more blue (or hotter) the object is. Conversely, the larger the color index, the more red (or cooler) the object is.
O-type stars frequently have complicated surroundings that make measurement of their spectra difficult. O-type spectra formerly were defined by the ratio of the strength of the He II λ4541 relative to that of He I λ4471, where λ is the radiation wavelength. Spectral type O7 was defined to be the point at which the two intensities are equal ...
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First-magnitude stars are the brightest stars in the night sky, with apparent magnitudes lower (i.e. brighter) than +1.50. [1] [2] Hipparchus, in the 1st century BC, introduced the magnitude scale. He allocated the first magnitude to the 20 brightest stars and the sixth magnitude to the faintest stars visible to the naked eye.