When you wish upon a star, is it already dead? An astronomer crunches the numbers

[Admin]

The stars we can see in the night sky are a lot closer and live a lot longer than you would think.

When you wish upon a star, is it already dead? An astronomer crunches the numbers : Read more

 

[Helio]

This article got me wondering about what we do see. So, thanks to VBA and the great data from here (AstroSCI), I found these results....

[These include all types (giants and supergiants).] Notice that the the average magnitude off all the stars is ~ 5.6, with the exception of the brighter O stars at 4.5 app. mag. The O stars, however, have an app. mag. of 5.0 when I bump the max. distance to 5k pc from the others at 1k pc. [The limit kicks out a few stars that have a 1E7 pc, erroneous distance value.]