Astronomy questions about stellar populations and the Milky Way?

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kattiger

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1. If you look up a list of the brightest stars in a book or on-line, you will see that they belong to all different luminosity classes. Why?

2. Why is the structure of the Milky Way so difficult to discern from the brightest stars only?

3. Could you plot stars on graphing paper using equatorial coordinates (RA, Dec) to determine the structure of the Milky Way? Discuss.

4. Besides their lumnosity class and position, what other properties of these bright stars would be useful for confirming that we live in a flat disk-like structure? Explain.
 
You really ought to do your own astronomy homework.

The important points relating to the above:

1) There are lots of relatively low-luminosity stars, and a few much more luminous ones.

2) Interstellar dust prevents us from seeing more than a small fraction of the whole Milky Way in visible light.

3) The most luminous stars we can see do trace out spiral structure.
 
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