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The star outside the solar system that appears the brightest is Sirius. It's actually not all that bright (absolute magnitude 1.4, or about 25 times brighter than the Sun), it's just very close to us (only about 8 light years away).

The second-brightest star in the night sky is Canopus, which actually really is pretty bright (absolute magnitude -5.5 ... lower is brighter, and Canopus is almost 13,000 times brighter than the Sun); it's about 300 light years away, and it only appears to be slightly dimmer than Sirius because of its much greater distance.

However, even Canopus is nowhere near the grand champion R136a1, which has the lowest absolute magnitude (highest intrinsic brightness) known: -12.5, almost nine million times brighter than the Sun. You can't see it without a pretty good telescope, because it's not even in our own Galaxy but in the Large Magellanic Cloud, 160,000 light years away. If it were at the same distance as Sirius, it would be significantly brighter than the full Moon.

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12y ago

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