RE: Interesting video
January 26, 2015 at 11:42 am
(This post was last modified: January 26, 2015 at 12:00 pm by Jackalope.)
(January 26, 2015 at 10:19 am)Alex K Wrote: I'm a bit confused about their rendition of Alpha Centauri. Are the two bright stars supposed to be Alpha Centauri A and B, and the dim one Proxima Centauri? That doesn't seem to make any sense considering that A and B have a distance of more than 10 AU, and Proxima Centauri to the others a distance of thousands of AUs. Wouldn't one star, A or B, be really big, the other noticeably dimmer and smaller, and Proxima almost invisible in broad daylight?
Yeah, pretty much. Not only that, but Proxima is a low luminosity red dwarf, and so at a distance of 13000 AU would be quite dim, certainly not the color it's rendered as in the image - I don't think it likely it would be visible at all during the night, and not very bright at night. We're talking about a star which emits about 0.0056% of the visible light compared to our Sun.
