5 Mind-Blowing Facts About Stars You Can See With the Naked Eye, According to Neil DeGrasse Tyson

1. Every star you see in the night sky is bigger and brighter than our sun
Of the 5,000 or so stars brighter than magnitude 6 (that is, bright enough to see with the eye), only a handful of very faint stars are approximately the same size and brightness of our sun. And the rest are all bigger and brighter. Of the 500 or so that are brighter than 4th magnitude (which includes essentially every star visible to the unaided eye from an urban location), all are intrinsically bigger and brighter than our sun, many by a large percentage. Of the brightest 50 stars visible to the human eye from Earth, the least intrinsically bright is Alpha Centauri, the closest star system to Earth at 4.2 light-years away. And Alpha Centauri is still more than 1.5 times more luminous than our sun (plus, because it’s so far south on the sky’s dome, it can’t be easily seen from most of the Northern Hemisphere).

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2. You can’t see millions of stars on a dark night
Despite what you may hear in TV commercials, poems and songs, you cannot see a million stars … anywhere. There simply are not enough stars close enough and bright enough to equal a million. On a really exceptional night, with no moon and far from any source of lights, a person with very good eyesight may be able to see 2,000-2,500 stars at any one time, although counting even this small number still would be difficult. So the next time you hear someone claim to have seen a million stars in the sky, just appreciate it as artistic license or exuberant exaggeration. It isn’t true and can’t be true!