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You mean like this one? http://www.astro.yale.edu/astrom/spmcat/histov.html http://www.astro.yale.edu/astrom/spmcat/histov.html Not really. Plus keep in mind

You mean like this one? http://www.astro.yale.edu/astrom/spmcat/histov.html http://www.astro.yale.edu/astrom/spmcat/histov.html Not really. Plus keep in mind magnitude is a logarithmic measure. Things get skewed when you take logarithms. Also if you look for example at star sizes: http://spiff.rit.edu/classes/phys440/lectures/size/diam_hist_closeup.gif http://spiff.rit.edu/classes/phys440/lectures/size/diam_hist... (from http://spiff.rit.edu/classes/phys440/lectures/size/size.html http://spiff.rit.edu/classes/phys440/lectures/size/size.html). The distribution is certainly not gaussian, and very much likely heavy tail.

teraflop 9y ago
Not to mention that the distributions from three different sky surveys (in your first link) look dramatically different. Which means the histograms are saying at least as much about the measurement process as they are about what's actually out there in the universe.
- privong 9y ago
  To add to that, the sharp cutoff at faint (large number) magnitudes is almost certainly a reflection of the fact that astronomical surveys and images have a flux limit, below which objects cannot be individually detected.