# How far out before some other star is brighter than the Sun?

**URL:** https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-far-out-before-some-other-star-is-brighter-than-the-sun/641873
**Category:** Factual Questions
**Created:** [November 23, 2012, 5:28am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-far-out-before-some-other-star-is-brighter-than-the-sun/641873 "2012-11-23T05:28:04Z")
**Posts on this page:** 1
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### Author: ![Chronos](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/chronos/32/134_2.png) [@Chronos](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Chronos)
#### Post date: [May 8, 2017, 1:03pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-far-out-before-some-other-star-is-brighter-than-the-sun/641873/76 "2017-05-08T13:03:09Z")

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OK, yeah, that was about what my intuition was telling me. I just wasn’t seeing a seam in some of those.

And **LSLGuy** , I know that it’s popular to talk about a GRB flash-sterilizing the entire planet, but it can’t happen. Gamma ray bursts have a duration of at most a few seconds, and they can’t penetrate through an entire planet. So you could flash-sterilize half of the planet (or at least, half of the land area-- The deep oceans would also be protected), but the other half would be (initially) untouched. Now, I’m sure that there would be severe long-term ecological consequences to the other half, and the flash would probably also produce opaque nitrogen oxides that would severely cut down sunlight for several years, but those are things that at least some life (probably even some humans) would still survive.

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