List of most luminous stars
Wikimedia list article
This is a list of stars arranged by their absolute magnitude – their intrinsic stellar luminosity. This cannot be observed directly, so instead must be calculated from the apparent magnitude (the brightness as seen from Earth), the distance to each star, and a correction for interstellar extinction. The entries in the list below are further corrected to provide the bolometric magnitude, i.e., integrated over all wavelengths; this relies upon measurements in multiple photometric filters and extrapolation of the stellar spectrum based on the stellar spectral type and/or effective temperature.
Entries give the bolometric luminosity in multiples of the luminosity of the Sun (L☉) and the bolometric absolute magnitude. As with all magnitude systems in astronomy, the latter scale is logarithmic and inverted i.e., more negative numbers are more luminous.
Most stars on this list are not bright enough to be visible to the naked eye from Earth, because of their high distances, high extinction, or because they emit most of their light outside the visible range. For a list of the brightest stars seen from Earth, see the list of brightest stars. There are three stars with over 1 million L☉ and visible to the naked eye: WR 22, WR 24 and Eta Carinae. All of these stars are located in the Carina nebula.
Measurement
Accurate measurement of stellar luminosities is difficult, even when the apparent magnitude is measured accurately, for four reasons:
The distance d to the star must be known, to convert apparent to absolute magnitude.
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This entry incorporates text from “List of most luminous stars” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.