which is the brightest star in our galaxy?

Question

excluding the sun

Answer 1

Of the cataloged stars, Sirus is the brightest as seen from earth.
see here: http://www.astro.wisc.edu/~dolan/constellations/extra/brightest.html

In absolute luminosity it's LBV 1806-20. See here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_most_luminous_stars

However, there are a great many stars near the center of the galaxy that have not been cataloged, so the above lists represent only the currently KNOWN stars.

Answer 2

Brightest Star In Our Galaxy

Answer 3

Just to add to Will's excellent answer, the distinctly named LBV 1806-20 is 38 million times brighter than our sun!! It cannot be seen with the naked eye simply because it is so far away. But if it were as close as Sirius is, it would be MUCH brighter than the full moon!

Minor factoid: Most of the bright stars that we see at night are actually much farther away than Sirius. We see them because they are bright, not because they are close. (Sirius appears bright mostly because it is relatively close to us, though it is also bigger than our sun.) Rigel, a star in Orion which appears almost as bright as Sirius is more than 100 times farther away. That means Rigel is really one very bright star! If you put our own sun at the distance of Sirius, it would be just another moderately bright star in the sky...perhaps a bit brighter than the stars of the Big Dipper.

Answer 4

Sun is the brightest... sirius is the the brightest after the sun!

Answer 5

That's the star whose name escaped me for a minute!!!!... LBV 1806-20:):)

As AZ mentioned, it's one exceptionally bright star, possibly the Galaxy's brightest. It lies around 70,000 light years away on the opposite side of the Galaxy.

The LBV part of the name stands for what type of star it is. LBV means Luminous Blue Variable. These stars are exceptionally rare. There's probably not more than a few dozen in the entire Galaxy....if that many. These stars are enormous......they're actually classed as hypergiants. A typical LBV star can be 200-500 times larger than the Sun, upto 120-200 times as massive and shine at a temperature greater than 20,000 degrees C. So, they shine in the blue and ultraviolet parts of the spectrum.

Their luminosities are absolutely stupendous.....a typical LBV is usually around 1-5 million times brighter than the Sun, but the can be MUCH brighter than that even. Bolometrically (total light output) can go right off the scale. Some of the largest LBV's can shine 100 to1000 times brighter than they do in visible light. As you've seen, LBV 1806-20 is 38 million times brighter than the Sun in the visible light. The Pistol Star....a star near the core of the Galaxy, is around 10 million times brighter. The daddy of them all is a star called Eta Carina, which can be seen by eye in the Sth Hemisphere and lies some 9000 light years away. At present it's surrounded by a nebula called the Homonculus (Little Man) Nebula. This star weighs in at least 120 Solar masses and is in a binary system with another monster star that weighs at least 80 Solar masses. Back in 1842, this star had a little hiccup.....it underwent an explosive mass loss event which made it for awhile the second brightest star in the sky, behind Sirius. The star lost 2-3 Solar masses of material in the explosion. Think about that......2-3 entire Suns worth of material!!!!. Needless to say it got bright........it's estimated it reached an astounding 60 million solar luminosities!!!!! This is just in visible light!!!. The star normally shines at an estimated 6-10 million. It's since quitened down but it maybe building for another event soon. Under normal conditions, this star is so bright that if a planet like the Earth orbited the star, for it to receive the same amount of light and heat we do from the Sun, it would have to orbit over a light year away from the star!!!. Unfortunately, the planet's lifetime would be cut awfully short, as Eta Carina and its like burn their supplies of hydrogen so prodigously that they only last 1-3 million years. Then when they go, it's not just an ordinary supernova that goes of. These stars are so huge and powerful that they let rip with an explosion which can be many thousands of times more spectacular......a Hypernova. Usually when this happens, the star completely obliterates itself, leaving no remnant at all. When Eta goes hypernova, and it could at anytime depending on how old it is, it will not just be visible at daytime. It will cast strong shadows in daytime!!!. It'll be many times brighter than the Full Moon of a night time, to the point that the night sky will actually be much like very late dusk.

These stars are not to be triffled with.....they're what you call a star:)

As for their more mundane cousins, the star Rigel (beta Orionis) is a Blue Supergiant star of spectral class B8. It's about 85 times larger than the Sun, 25 times its mass and shines at around 80-90,000 Solar luminosities. Brighter still is Deneb (alpha Cygni), which is a rare White Supergiant of spectral class A2. It's some 200 times larger than the Sun, 20 times the mass and 160,000 times brighter. Rigel lies some 890 light years away, Deneb is about 2600 light years.

The brightest star of them all, possible in the entire universe, is the central star of the cluster that resides in the core of the Tarantula Nebula which is in the Large Magellanic Cloud, some 180,000 light years from Earth. The star named R134, is the central star of a massive star cluster made up of several hundred B and O class super and hypergiant stars. It's estimated the star is 200 times more massive than the Sun and about 200-400 times larger. It shines at an incredible 100,000,000 Solar luminosities!!!! It's that large it is pushing the limit for the present size of a star...the Eddington Limit. That's where the amount of light given off is so huge that gravity can't compete with it and the star blows itself apart almost as soon as it's formed. That limit is somewhere around 120-200 solar masses for present day stars.

Answer 6

Moon

Answer 7

Sirius

Answer 8

Sun.

Answer 9

simple ?'s like this just google it