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Stellar Magnitude System
Stellar Magnitude System
Ancient Origins
Star magnitudes do count backward, the result of an ancient fluke that seemed like a good idea at the
time. The story begins around 129 B.C., when the Greek astronomer Hipparchus produced the first
well-known star catalog. Hipparchus ranked his stars in a simple way. He called the brightest ones
"of the first magnitude," simply meaning "the biggest." Stars not so bright he called "of the second
magnitude," or second biggest. The faintest stars he could see he called "of the sixth magnitude."
Around A.D. 140 Claudius Ptolemy copied this system in his own star list. Sometimes Ptolemy
added the words "greater" or "smaller" to distinguish between stars within a magnitude class.
Ptolemy's works remained the basic astronomy texts for the next 1,400 years, so everyone used the
system of first to sixth magnitudes. It worked just fine.
Galileo forced the first change. On turning his newly made telescopes to the sky, Galileo discovered
that stars existed that were fainter than Ptolemy's sixth magnitude. "Indeed, with the glass you will
detect below stars of the sixth magnitude such a crowd of others that escape natural sight that it is
hardly believable," he exulted in his 1610 tract Sidereus Nuncius. "The largest of these . . . we may
designate as of the seventh magnitude." Thus did a new term enter the astronomical language, and
the magnitude scale became open-ended. There could be no turning back.
As telescopes got bigger and better, astronomers kept adding more magnitudes to the bottom of the
scale. Today a pair of 50-millimeter binoculars will show stars of about 9th magnitude, a 6-inch
amateur telescope will reach to 13th magnitude, and the Hubble Space Telescope has seen objects as
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By the middle of the 19th century, astronomers realized there was a pressing need to define the entire
magnitude scale more precisely than by eyeball judgment. They had already determined that a 1st-
magnitude star shines with about 100 times the light of a 6th-magnitude star. Accordingly, in 1856
the Oxford astronomer Norman R. Pogson proposed that a difference of five magnitudes be exactly
defined as a brightness ratio of 100 to 1. This convenient rule was quickly adopted. One magnitude
thus corresponds to a brightness difference of exactly the fifth root of 100, or very close to 2.512 —
a value known as the Pogson ratio.
0 1 to 1
0.1 1.1 to 1
0.2 1.2 to 1
0.3 1.3 to 1
0.4 1.4 to 1
0.5 1.6 to 1
1.0 2.5 to 1
2 6.3 to 1
3 16 to 1
4 40 to 1
5 100 to 1
10 10,000 to 1
20 100,000,000 to 1
The resulting magnitude scale is logarithmic, in neat agreement with the 1850s belief that all human
senses are logarithmic in their response to stimuli. The decibel scale for rating loudness was likewise
made logarithmic.
Alas, it's not quite so, not for brightness, sound, or anything else. Our perceptions of the world
follow power-law curves, not logarithmic ones. Thus a star of magnitude 3.0 does not in fact look
exactly halfway in brightness between 2.0 and 4.0. It looks a little fainter than that. The star that
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looks halfway between 2.0 and 4.0 will be about magnitude 2.8. The wider the magnitude gap, the
greater this discrepancy. Accordingly, Sky & Telescope's computer-drawn sky maps use star dots that
are sized according to a power-law relation.
Now that star magnitudes were ranked on a precise mathematical scale, however ill-fitting, another
problem became unavoidable. Some "1st-magnitude" stars were a whole lot brighter than others.
Astronomers had no choice but to extend the scale out to brighter values as well as faint ones. Thus
Rigel, Capella, Arcturus, and Vega are magnitude 0, an awkward statement that sounds like they
have no brightness at all! But it was too late to start over. The magnitude scale extends farther into
negative numbers: Sirius shines at magnitude –1.5, Venus reaches –4.4, the full Moon is about –
12.5, and the Sun blazes at magnitude –26.7.
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But different photographic emulsions have different spectral responses! And people's eyes differ too.
For one thing, your eye lenses turn yellow with age; old people see the world through yellow filters.
Magnitude systems designed for different wavelength ranges had to be more clearly defined than
this.
Today, precise magnitudes are specified by what a standard photoelectric photometer sees through
standard color filters. Several photometric systems have been devised; the most familiar is called
UBV after the three filters most commonly used. U encompasses the near-ultraviolet, B is blue, and
V corresponds fairly closely to the old visual magnitude; its wide peak is in the yellow-green band,
where the eye is most sensitive.
Color index is now defined as the B magnitude minus the V magnitude. A pure white star has a B-V
of about 0.2, our yellow Sun is 0.63, orange-red Betelgeuse is 1.85, and the bluest star believed
possible is –0.4, pale blue-white.
So successful was the UBV system that it was extended redward with R and I filters to define
standard red and near-infrared magnitudes. Hence it is sometimes called UBVRI. Infrared
astronomers have carried it to still longer wavelengths, picking up alphabetically after I to define the
J, K, L, M, N, and Q bands. These were chosen to match the wavelengths of infrared "windows" in
the Earth's atmosphere — wavelengths at which water vapor does not entirely absorb starlight.
In all wavebands, the bright star Vega has been chosen (arbitrarily) to define magnitude 0.0. Since
Vega is dimmer at infrared wavelengths than in visible light, infrared magnitudes are, by definition
and quite artificially, "brighter" than their visual counterparts.
What, then, is an object's real brightness? How much total energy is it sending to us at all
wavelengths combined, visible and invisible? The answer is called the bolometric magnitude,mbol,
because total radiation was once measured with a device called a bolometer. The bolometric
magnitude has been called the God's-eye view of an object's true luster. Astrophysicists value it as
the true measure of an object's total energy emission as seen from Earth. The bolometric correction
tells how much brighter the bolometric magnitude is than the V magnitude. Its value is always
negative, because any star or object emits at least some radiation outside the visual portion of the
electromagnetic spectrum.
Up to now we've been dealing only with apparent magnitudes — how bright things look from Earth.
We don't know how intrinsically bright an object is until we also take its distance into account. Thus
astronomers created the absolute magnitude scale. An object's absolute magnitude is simply how
bright it would appear if placed at a standard distance of 10 parsecs (32.6 light-years).
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