Abstract
Some stars shine brighter than others. We say that they are of different magnitudes, or levels of brightness. Hipparchus, who lived around 150 B.C., classified all stars visible to the naked eye into six classes according to their brightness. The writings in which this ancient Greek astronomer described the magnitude system, almost certainly for the very first time, are long gone.
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Notes
- 1.
A stellar wind is a stream of charged particles that are ejected from the upper atmosphere of a star. It consists mostly of a high-speed protons and electrons that have enough energy to escape the star’s gravity.
- 2.
Neutrinos are particles that can easily escape the dense and hot core of the Sun. About 16,000 billions neutrinos from the Sun pass through this book every second. However, it would take a million years for one to become trapped and start a reaction.
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Kambič, B. (2009). Those Wonderful Distant Suns. In: Viewing the Constellations with Binoculars. Patrick Moore's Practical Astronomy Series. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-0-387-85355-0_3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-0-387-85355-0_3
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