Starship 101

Stephen Hawking would probably say, “Scintillate, scintillate stellar body with a magnitude greater than one.”  But, that would make for a lousy poem.

What makes stars twinkle? Twinkling is technically known as stellar scintillation.  It is caused by atmospheric turbulence.  One of the advantages the Hubble telescope has is not having to deal with twinkling, since it is outside of our atmosphere.

What makes stars little? How big or little a star looks in the sky is a factor of not only how big and bright a star really is, but also how far away it is.  Astronomers measure the apparent brightness of stars using magnitudes.  Unfortunately the scale is backwards.  The smaller the magnitude, the brighter the star.  (Go figure.)

The brightest stars are about -1.  Stars can have magnitudes of -1, 0, 1, 2, 3, 4, and so on.  The scale is logarithmic, kind of like the decibels your stereo puts out.  Each star magnitude is 2.512 times brighter than the previous magnitude as you move down the scale.  A magnitude of 1 for example would be 100 times brighter than a 6. A -1 would be 100 million times brighter than a 19.