Strange Universe: The Magnitude of the Problem 3/12/23

To the ancient Greeks the sky was crammed with mythological figures. Few resembled the people or animals they were supposed to portray. But the Greeks were gifted essay-test-takers who could fill in the blanks with the best of them, and they knew observers could always recognize a star’s brilliance. So a man named Hipparchus who lived on Rhodes devised a scheme for sorting out star brightness. Tune in to hear how his system, still in use today, assigned each star one of six different magnitudes.