What Do You Know About The Brightest Star?

Looking up in the sky we try to find the brightest star. We imagine that the stars are in countless numbers. At the most, we can see about 6000 stars without a telescope. About 25 percent of them are too far south to be seen in North America.

About 2000 years ago, since the days of the Greek astronomers, the stars are classified according to the magnitude or brightness. These we divided into six categories only until the advent of the telescope. The brightest rank at number one of the list and the faintest are placed at serial six. The still fainter ones cannot be viewed without a telescope. Now, with advancement, the stars can be photographed. The list is supplemented to the 21st magnitude of brightness. A star of a certain magnitude of brightness is about two and a half times fainter than a star of the magnitude above it. There are only 22 stars of the first magnitude which is the brightest classification. The brightest star of all is Sirius, which has a magnitude of 1.6. This makes Sirius over 1000 times brighter than the faintest star that we can view with our naked eye.

As we go lower down in magnitude, the number of stars is more in that classification. The number of stars in the faintest magnitude category is about 1,000,000,000, placed at serial 20th.