Transcript: It’s amazing to think that the Sun, which dominates the daytime sky and brings warmth and life to the Earth, is fundamentally the same as the stars in the night sky. Galileo started this thinking with his observations using the telescope to show that the stars in the night sky have a huge range of apparent brightness. Perhaps the Sun is just the very brightest of these stars. In the late seventeenth century Christiaan Huygens estimated the distance to the stars by emitting sunlight through a pinhole and adjusting the pinhole until the light that entered was the same as from the bright star Sirius. It was one-twenty-seven-thousandth of the Sun light implying to Huygens that Sirius was twenty-seven thousand times further away than the Sun. Newton used a similar reasoning by using Saturn as a mirror reflecting sunlight and comparing its brightness to the bright stars. Also, the inverse square law could be used to estimate that the brightest stars may be as much as 100 thousand times further away than the Sun. These are all crude estimates that make fundamental assumptions about the nature of the stars relative to the Sun.