Page "Main sequence" Paragraph 8

At Princeton University, Henry Norris Russell was following a similar course of research.

He was studying the relationship between the spectral classification of stars and their actual brightness as corrected for distance — their absolute magnitude.

For this purpose he used a set of stars that had reliable parallaxes and many of which had been categorized at Harvard.

When he plotted the spectral types of these stars against their absolute magnitude, he found that dwarf stars followed a distinct relationship.

This allowed the real brightness of a dwarf star to be predicted with reasonable accuracy.