List of most luminous stars

Below is a list of stars arranged in order of decreasing luminosity (increasing bolometric magnitude). Accurate measurement of stellar luminosities is quite difficult in practice, even when the apparent magnitude is measured accurately, for four reasons:
Because of all these problems, other references may give "very" different values for the most luminous stars (different ordering or different stars altogether). Data on different stars can be of somewhat different reliability, depending on the attention one particular star has received as well as largely differing physical difficulties in analysis (see the Pistol Star for an example). The last stars in the list are familiar nearby stars put there for comparison, and not among the most luminous known. It may also interest the reader to know that the Sun is more luminous than approximately 95% of all known stars in the local neighbourhood (out to, say, a few hundred light years), due to enormous numbers of somewhat less massive stars that are cooler and often much less luminous. For perspective, the overall range of stellar luminosities runs from dwarfs less than 1/10,000th as luminous as the Sun to supergiants over 1,000,000 times more luminous.
Data.
This list is currently limited mostly to objects in our galaxy and the Magellanic Clouds, but a few stars in other local group galaxies can now be examined in enough detail to determine the luminosities. Some suspected binaries in this magnitude range are excluded because there is insufficient information about the luminosity of the individual components. Selected fainter stars are also shown for comparison. Despite their extreme luminosity, many of these stars are nevertheless too distant to be observed with the naked eye. Stars that are at least sometimes visible to the unaided eye have their apparent magnitude (6.5 or brighter) highlighted in blue.
The first list show a few of the known stars with an estimated luminosity of 1 million L☉ or greater, including the stars in open cluster, OB association and H II region. The majority of stars thought to be more than 1 million L☉ are shown, but the list is incomplete.
The second list gives some notable stars for the purpose of comparison.
A few notable stars of luminosity less than 1 million are kept here for the purpose of comparison.
Note that even the most luminous stars are much less luminous than the more luminous persistent extragalactic objects, such as quasars. For example, 3C 273 has an average apparent magnitude of 12.8 (when observing with a telescope), but an absolute magnitude of −26.7. If this object were 10 parsecs away from Earth it would appear nearly as bright in the sky as the Sun (apparent magnitude −26.74). This quasar's luminosity is, therefore, about 2 trillion (1012) times that of the Sun, or about 100 times that of the total light of average large galaxies like our Milky Way. (Note that quasars often vary somewhat in luminosity.)
In terms of gamma rays, a magnetar (type of neutron star) called SGR 1806−20, had an extreme burst reach Earth on 27 December 2004. It was the brightest event known to have impacted this planet from an origin outside the Solar System; if these gamma rays were visible, with an absolute magnitude of approximately −29, it would have been brighter than the Sun (as measured by the Swift spacecraft).
The gamma-ray burst GRB 971214 measured in 1998 was at the time thought to be the most energetic event in the observable universe, with the equivalent energy of several hundred supernovae. Later studies pointed out that the energy was probably the energy of one supernova which had been "beamed" towards Earth by the geometry of a relativistic jet.