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Studies of a Population of Stars: How Bright Are the Stars, Really?

Make observations and use available data and simple calculations to correlate observations and data in the characterization of stars. In this activity, the distances to bright stars are calculated. The apparent brightness of these stars is then adjusted for distance to see which stars are intrinsically bright and which only appear bright because of their proximity to Earth.

Author(s):

Stephen J. Edberg

Date Accepted: 2013-05-03 Grade Group: High School (9-12) Benchmarks: M6.4.4 M6.4.9 M8.4.20 M8.4.22 S15.4.4 S3.3.1 S3.4.3 Keywords: star brightness magnitude distance Microsoft Word: 03_05_10_2.docx PDF Document: 03_05_10_2.pdf