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Using the Magnitude Scale to Compare Star Brightness

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  • 0:02 The Magnitude Scale
  • 0:58 Apparent Brightness &…
  • 2:37 A Quick Calculation
  • 3:54 Lesson Summary
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Lesson Transcript
Instructor: Artem Cheprasov
This lesson will describe the magnitude scale, apparent brightness, and apparent visual magnitude. It will also teach you how to compare the brightness of stars.

The Magnitude Scale

One of the most famous and last great astronomers of the ancient world was Claudius Ptolemaeus. You know him better as Ptolemy. A genius of a man, he worked in Alexandria, the capital of all things science back in his day.

He developed a system for the motions of the planets, oriented maps using the cardinal directions, and invented the concepts of latitude and longitude.

He also did one other thing - what this lesson is all about. He described the brightness of stars he observed using what's called the magnitude system, or magnitude scale, an astronomical brightness scale.

Whether he completely came up with this idea on his own or it was simply a summary of ideas of astronomers that came before him (such as those of Hipparchus) is best left for a history lesson to debate. Instead, this lesson will describe what this magnitude scale is and how astronomers use it today.

Apparent Brightness & Visual Magnitude

The magnitude system Ptolemy apparently invented was based on apparent brightness, how bright a star appears to be to an observer. This property depends on the distance the observer is from the star. The sun will be fainter when viewed from Uranus than when viewed from Earth just like a flashlight appears fainter when you're farther away from it than when you're closer to it even though its true brightness never changes.

Anyways, ancient astronomers divided the stars they observed into six classes. The brightest stars were known as first-magnitude stars and the faintest stars were known as sixth-magnitude stars. This clearly means that the larger the magnitude, the fainter the star.

Using modern telescopes and detectors, today's astronomers have been more precise in estimating magnitude, so much so that magnitudes like 3.34 or 0.04 exist. Actually, some stars are so bright that the current magnitude scale moves into negative numbers. The scale has expanded into the other direction as well. Stars beyond about the sixth magnitude are ones that are so faint that we can't see them with our unaided eyes but we can see them with telescopes.

Today, each magnitude is more formally referred to as apparent visual magnitude, the apparent brightness of a star as seen from Earth, expressed using the magnitude scale. Since apparent visual magnitude depends on the human eye, it only includes the visible form of light. Infrared or ultraviolet light, which we can't see naturally, are excluded from any measurements even though some stars emit a lot of these types of light.

A Quick Calculation

The standard magnitude scale is able to tell us how much brighter one star is compared to another if we know their individual magnitudes.

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You are viewing lesson Lesson 7 in chapter 10 of the course:

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Basics of Astronomy

28 chapters | 325 lessons

Ch 10. Measurement of Star Qualities
Ch 11. Momentum, Energy, Pressure,...

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