by Ann » Mon Jan 27, 2014 11:56 pm
Anthony Barreiro wrote:rstevenson wrote:Didn't I read, probably somewhere here on the Asterisk, that every star we can see with the naked eye is within about 55 ly of Sol?
Rob
My rule of thumb is that almost all the individual stars we can see with our unaided eyes are tens to hundreds of light years distant. There are a few stars closer than 10 light years, and a few very bright stars visible over thousands of light years.
And almost all those stars that we can see with the naked eye are intrinsically brighter than the Sun. About 99% of those stars we can see with the naked eye are brighter than the Sun. However, about 95% of all the stars in the Sun's neighbourhood, and therefore possibly in all of the Milky Way, are fainter than the Sun.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_mo ... nous_stars wrote:
It may also interest the reader to know that the Sun is more luminous than approximately 95% of all known stars in the local neighborhood (out to, say, a few hundred light years), due to enormous numbers of somewhat less massive stars that are cooler and often much less luminous.
Ken Crosswell wrote in his book Planet Quest First Harvest Edition 1998, chapter 5, page 78:
Incredibly, 99 percent of the stars visible to the naked eye outshine the Sun, yet 95 percent of all stars that exist actually emit less light than the Sun.
Proxima Centauri, the most nearby of all stars at a distance of 4.227 ± 0.014 light-years, is about 50,000 times closer to us than HD 5980 in the Small Magellanic Cloud, yet both Proxima Centauri and HD 5980 are eleventh magnitude stars in our skies. Admittedly the comparison isn't absolutely fair, since
HD 5980 is a triple star. But still.
Ann
[quote="Anthony Barreiro"][quote="rstevenson"]Didn't I read, probably somewhere here on the Asterisk, that every star we can see with the naked eye is within about 55 ly of Sol?
Rob[/quote]
My rule of thumb is that almost all the individual stars we can see with our unaided eyes are tens to hundreds of light years distant. There are a few stars closer than 10 light years, and a few very bright stars visible over thousands of light years.[/quote]
And almost all those stars that we can see with the naked eye are intrinsically brighter than the Sun. About 99% of those stars we can see with the naked eye are brighter than the Sun. However, about 95% of all the stars in the Sun's neighbourhood, and therefore possibly in all of the Milky Way, are fainter than the Sun.
[quote]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_most_luminous_stars wrote:
It may also interest the reader to know that the Sun is more luminous than approximately 95% of all known stars in the local neighborhood (out to, say, a few hundred light years), due to enormous numbers of somewhat less massive stars that are cooler and often much less luminous.[/quote]
[quote]Ken Crosswell wrote in his book [i]Planet Quest[/i] First Harvest Edition 1998, chapter 5, page 78:
Incredibly, 99 percent of the stars visible to the naked eye outshine the Sun, yet 95 percent of all stars that exist actually emit [i]less[/i] light than the Sun.[/quote]
Proxima Centauri, the most nearby of all stars at a distance of 4.227 ± 0.014 light-years, is about 50,000 times closer to us than HD 5980 in the Small Magellanic Cloud, yet both Proxima Centauri and HD 5980 are eleventh magnitude stars in our skies. Admittedly the comparison isn't absolutely fair, since [url=http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HD_5980]HD 5980 is a triple star[/url]. But still.
Ann