LUMINOSITY

Pronunciation (US):

(GB):

 Dictionary entry overview: What does luminosity mean? 

• LUMINOSITY (noun)
  The noun LUMINOSITY has 1 sense:

1. the quality of being luminous; emitting or reflecting light

  Familiarity information: LUMINOSITY used as a noun is very rare.

 Dictionary entry details 

• LUMINOSITY (noun)

Sense 1

Meaning:

The quality of being luminous; emitting or reflecting light

Classified under:

Nouns denoting attributes of people and objects

Synonyms:

brightness; brightness level; light; luminance; luminosity; luminousness

Context example:

its luminosity is measured relative to that of our sun

Hypernyms ("luminosity" is a kind of...):

physical property (any property used to characterize matter and energy and their interactions)

Attribute:

bright (emitting or reflecting light readily or in large amounts)

dull (emitting or reflecting very little light)

Hyponyms (each of the following is a kind of "luminosity"):

illuminance; illumination (the luminous flux incident on a unit area)

incandescence (light from heat)

glow; luminescence (light from nonthermal sources)

Derivation:

luminous (softly bright or radiant)

 Context examples 

The astronomers initially selected this galaxy to validate accepted models about lower-luminosity active galaxies—those with black holes that are on a meager diet of material.

(Hubble Uncovers Black Hole Disk that Shouldn't Exist, NASA)

The combination of their pulsation periods and known luminosity allowed the scientists to determine their location with the high accuracy of between 3 to 5 percent.

(Scientists Say Milky Way Is Warped & Twisted Not Flat, The Titi Tudorancea Bulletin)

The luminosity and rotation are used together to determine a star's Rossby number, relating to plasma flow.

(Sun's mood swings not so strange after all, Wikinews)

The energy from this corpse of a star is enough to power the gamma-ray luminosity we are seeing.

(Pulse of a Dead Star Powers Intense Gamma Rays, NASA)

The supermassive black hole in the center of the quasar gobbles up an enormous amount of nearby materials, which glare and shine when they constitute an accretion disk before finally sliding down in the black hole, said Hongyan Zhou, faculty member at the University of Science and Technology of China about the universe’s brightest beacons; shining with magnitudes more luminosity than entire galaxies and the stars they contain.

(Astronomers Study How Quasars Are Powered by Accretion Disks, The Titi Tudorancea Bulletin)

They found the Sun operated on the same basic principles as other stars: The activity of all stars in the system was found to be driven by their luminosity, their rotation, and nothing else.

(Sun's mood swings not so strange after all, Wikinews)

I hadn't gone twenty yards when I heard my name and Gatsby stepped from between two bushes into the path. I must have felt pretty weird by that time because I could think of nothing except the luminosity of his pink suit under the moon.

(The Great Gatsby, by F. Scott Fitzgerald)