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Asymptotic giant branch – Stars powered by fusion of hydrogen and helium in shell with an inactive core of carbon and oxygen; Galaxy color–magnitude diagram – Chart depicting the relationship between brightness and mass of large star systems; Hayashi track – Luminosity–temperature relationship in stars
minimum brightness [42] +1.33: star Alpha Centauri B: seen from Earth +1.86: planet Mars: seen from Earth minimum brightness [42] +1.98: star Polaris: seen from Earth mean brightness [49] +3.03: supernova SN 1987A: seen from Earth in the Large Magellanic Cloud (160,000 light-years away) +3 to +4: Faintest stars visible in an urban neighborhood ...
Once this distance is found, the distance away can be found via the arc subtended in the sky, giving a preliminary distance measurement. From this measurement and the apparent magnitudes of both stars, the luminosities can be found, and by using the mass–luminosity relationship, the masses of each star. These masses are used to re-calculate ...
Since the effective temperature is merely a number that represents the temperature of a black body that would reproduce the luminosity, it obviously cannot be measured directly, but it can be estimated from the spectrum. An alternative way to measure stellar luminosity is to measure the star's apparent brightness and distance.
Early photometric measurements (made, for example, by using a light to project an artificial “star” into a telescope's field of view and adjusting it to match real stars in brightness) demonstrated that first magnitude stars are about 100 times brighter than sixth magnitude stars.
Cepheids change brightness due to the κ–mechanism, [1] [2] which occurs when opacity in a star increases with temperature rather than decreasing. [3] The main gas involved is thought to be helium. The cycle is driven by the fact doubly ionized helium, the form adopted at high temperatures, is more opaque than singly ionized helium. As a ...
Such stars are said to be on the main sequence and are called dwarf stars. Starting at zero-age main sequence, the proportion of helium in a star's core will steadily increase, the rate of nuclear fusion at the core will slowly increase, as will the star's temperature and luminosity. [76]
Brightness temperature or radiance temperature is a measure of the intensity of electromagnetic energy coming from a source. [1] In particular, it is the temperature at which a black body would have to be in order to duplicate the observed intensity of a grey body object at a frequency ν {\displaystyle \nu } . [ 2 ]