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The Sun is the brightest star as viewed from Earth, at −26.78 mag. The second brightest is Sirius at −1.46 mag. For comparison, the brightest non-stellar objects in the Solar System have maximum brightnesses of: the Moon −12.7 mag [1] Venus −4.92 mag; Jupiter −2.94 mag; Mars −2.94 mag; Mercury −2.48 mag; Saturn −0.55 mag [2]
In 1856, Norman Robert Pogson formalized the system by defining a first magnitude star as a star that is 100 times as bright as a sixth-magnitude star, thereby establishing the logarithmic scale still in use today. This implies that a star of magnitude m is about 2.512 times as bright as a star of magnitude m + 1.
Brightest planet −2.20 [6]: 39 −2.94 [6]: 39 Jupiter: Planet −1.46 Sirius: Binary star system: Brightest night star −0.74 Canopus: Star −0.29 [7] Alpha Centauri AB Binary star system Part of a triple star system with Proxima Centauri: −0.05 Arcturus: Star Brightest Population II star 0.03 −0.02 Vega: Star 0.08 0.03 [8] Capella ...
The Sun is by far the brightest object in the Earth's sky, with an apparent magnitude of −26.74. [ 33 ] [ 34 ] This is about 13 billion times brighter than the next brightest star, Sirius , which has an apparent magnitude of −1.46.
An illustration of light sources from magnitude 1 to 3.5, in 0.5 increments. In astronomy, magnitude is a measure of the brightness of an object, usually in a defined passband. An imprecise but systematic determination of the magnitude of objects was introduced in ancient times by Hipparchus. Magnitude values do not have a unit.
The probe became the first spacecraft to “touch the sun” by successfully flying through the sun’s corona, or upper atmosphere, to sample particles and our star’s magnetic fields in ...
Canopus is too bright to be included in the normal observation runs of the Gaia satellite and there is no published Gaia parallax for it. [56] At present the star is drifting further away from the Sun with a radial velocity of 20 km/s. Some 3.1 million years ago it made the closest approach to the Sun at a distance of about 172 ly (53 pc).
Astronomers have discovered what may be the brightest object in the universe, a quasar with a black hole at its heart growing so fast that it swallows the equivalent of a sun a day. The black hole ...