[Qwinn]

You know what shocked me quite a bit?

According to this, you can't see our sun at all from 10 light years out... not even a pinpoint star. And yet the nearest star to ours is 4 light years away (Alpha Centauri). That means our sun isn't even -visible- to the naked eye throughout 99.999999% of the galaxy!

That would indicate our sun is very dim compared to all the ones we can see at night - and yet ours is a pretty average star, I always thought. Freaky!

Qwinn

[MikeD]

There must be an error somewhere. The sun has an absolute magnitude of 4.6 or so. That means at a distance of 32 lightyears (or 10 parsecs), the sun would appear as a magnitude 4.6 star. That is roughly ten times fainter than the North Star appears to us. The limit on a clear night in the country is about magnitude 6, or roughly 4 times fainter.

The magnitude scale is logarithmic, so that every change of 2.5 magnitudes is a power of ten. Don't ask -- that's just the way things are done in astronomy.

Anyway, the point is that you could see the Sun from ten light years away as long as you were in a dark area.

MD