Quote:
Originally Posted by strongmanmike
Well done Chris, one of those things I think many of us have thought about doing but never have so good on you....it is a somewhat inconsequential looking star huh?
Mike
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Mike, I do agree, Red Dwarf stars sure do look inconsequential......
The very faintest & lowest-mass individual Red Dwarf stars are about
a million times less luminous than our own Sun!...... These 'vanishingly faint' little stars weigh in at about 0.08 solar masses each, which shows that these little 'stellar critters'
do actually contain substantial mass....and this also implies that their tiny energy output is due to the inefficiency with which these small stars emit light.
I believe that Proxima Centauri has a visual
absolute magnitude of 15.45 (I think!), as compared to a visual absolute magnitude of 4.82 for the Sun, which makes Proxima some
17,000 times less luminous than our Sun.
(at the other end of the scale, the
most luminous stars have about
a million times larger energy output than our own Sun)
The total range of
stellar mass, from 0.08 solar mass stars through to 120 solar mass stars, is relatively small.
But the
luminosity range of the stars in our Galaxy is much much larger!
Is the Sun, therefore, a "typical" star? Recent work shows that, in fact, the
most numerous stars are about 0.3 solar masses each, so in fact the 'typical star' is a lot less massive and luminous than our Sun!
This is why people who study even the largest-scale structures in the universe have to worry about these tiny Red Dwarf stars; these extremely-numerous Very Faint stars can contribute a meaningful portion of the total mass of a Galaxy......
Best regards,
Robert
Madbadgalaxyman's comment of the day:
From the above simple arguments about stellar masses, it is easy to see that the 100 billion solar masses of stars in our Milky Way Galaxy are
not made up of 100 Billion individual stars "like it says in the textbooks". The textbooks lie!
.... didn't think I'd gone deep enough, as the nova.astrometry.net site wouldn't ID what I thought was proxima as so - it has obviously shifted from J2000 coords.... I ended up confused, as I thought I must have it, given its magnitude....
