How do we measure the brightness of stars? How does the brightness correlate to the number of stars in the galaxy?
It’s all relative! 😉 If we start with a standard star like the Sun, we can put A LOT of filters in front of a detector, until the light on the detector is the same as the light from a star without any filters, and then measure the transmission of the filters that were required to make the light on the detectors the same. Then we know how much fainter the star is than the Sun!!! Nuthin to it!!! The correlation between a single star and the number of stars in a galaxy is quite complex–that is to say it’s a subject of active research!! 😉 But basically, stars are quite similar from galaxy to galaxy; young galaxies tend to have more bright stars, which go through their life cycle more rapidly than fainter stars; so older galaxies tend to have more faint stars. Check the LFSUN WWW site, which has LOTS of URL’s for astronomical sites. g’luck SUN QUESTION: Is there life on the Sun? Byran ANSWER: It is way too hot to support life as we know it. On most of the Sun it is too hot to keep mole
